Going Out

July 20, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Light bulbs, parties, jaunts, the final things –
The last most thought about at eighty-four,
Now as I gingerly change one of the first.
As for the second and third, not much these days,
Lacking an appetite for either. Drink –
A pale dilution, watered wine; no taste
For bad behaviour, mad hilarity,
Or staying up too late.
Or fashions, either –
I never paid attention to such things,
Not noticing when skirts went up or down,
Or poets began each line with lower case.

Last orders, ending up, or final things –
All titles with a flavour of last words,
All leading up to this one: going out.

by Anthony Thwaite

The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book’s contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite ‘writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.’

Anthony Thwaite has been a university teacher, a radio producer, and a literary editor. His first collection came out in 1953, and Enitharmon published his Collected Poems in 2007 and Late Poems in 2010. He is one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors and editors. He is married to the biographer Ann Thwaite and lives in Norfolk. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website, and hear Anthony read from his poems on the Poetry Archive website.

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.

A Calvinist in Love

June 22, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I will not kiss you, country fashion,
By hedgesides where
Weasel and hare
Claim kinship with our passion.

I care no more for fickle moonlight:
Would rather see
Your face touch me
Under a claywork dune-light.

I want no scent or softness round us
When we embrace:
We could not trace
Therein what beauties bound us.

This bare clay-pit is truest setting
For love like ours:
No bed of flowers
But sand-ledge for our petting.

The Spring is not our mating season:
The lift of sap
Would but entrap
Our souls and lead to treason.

This truculent gale, this pang of winter
Awake our joy,
For they employ
Moods that made Calvary splinter.

We need no vague and dreamy fancies:
Care not to sight
The Infinite
In transient necromancies.

No poetry on earth can fasten
Its vampire mouth
Upon our youth:
We know the sly assassin.

We cannot fuse with fallen Nature’s
Our rhythmic tide:
It is allied
With laws beyond the creatures.

by Jack Clemo

A reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire, and an Illumination Poetry Workshop with Penny Boxhall, Tuesday 30th June, Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Jack Clemo (1916-1994), English poet and author whose physical sufferings – he became deaf about 1936 and blind in 1955 – influenced his work. Clemo’s formal education ended when he was 13. His early poems reflect the stark landscape of the clay-pits in their austere intensity. Important in his writings are the themes of Christianity and conversion, erotic mysticism and marriage, and the role of suffering in attaining happiness. He married Ruth Peaty in 1968, and she inspired his later poetry, which shows a softened acceptance of sex and love. During his lifetime Jack Clemo was considered one of the most important poets Cornwall has produced but as with many major poets his work fell into obscurity after his death in 1994. This Selected Poems represents his return to prominence. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Writing about his work in The Independent, John Mole commented that Clemo was ‘a remarkable and original writer… [whose] charged, evangelical language has a strenuous urgency, a mixture of austere beauty and an often remorseless emphasis on the “striving flesh”, the “storm-flash of grace”.’

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.

San F.

February 16, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bridged city under fog-white hills
The weeks were love and ended our eyes turning
Away past silence, endurable, the way damp soil tills.
In front of October, already, love was slower burning.
Wakeless suspension, her absence the agent of fever,
You gave the meaning of newspapers, and cleared the mist,
Silently plaguing like a dress I can’t remember
As i held back love with gripped fist.
Sirocco, and even the week-ends spent
The mental move must precede suitcases packed
Standing eternally within this dolmen we bent
Two memories and me gazing into plaster cracked.
Give time the time to rewind cells
Another meeting will arrange new hells.

by Ed Dorn

Our contemporary poetry conference, New to Next Generation 2014, takes place between 13-14 March 2015 in London, and features a wide range of discussion panels, poets (such as Helen Mort and Nick Drake), publishers and editors (like Peter Target from this week’s publisher, Enitharmon, Tom Chivers, and Karen McCarthy Woolf), and critics (such as David Wheatley, Suzi Feay, and Jeremy Noel-Tod). You can register for the conference on the IES website. All are welcome. On 13 March, there is also a free evening reading featuring Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe. Please register for that here.

‘San F.’ is copyright © Edward Dorn, 2015. It is published in Derelict Air, and is reprinted here by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of Edward Dorn’s previously uncollected poetry. Whereas Dorn’s Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes: impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children’s book, “confetti poems” meant to shower the 1968 DNC, translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties ‘stock ticker’. Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Dorn’s poetry makes fully visible the transatlantic roots of his anti-capitalism, and is a must-have for anyone interested in post-War American modernism. The book contains a large number of illustrations, including reproductions of manuscripts which reveal Dorn’s unique style of composition. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website, and listen to Ed Dorn read from his work on the PennSound website.

Edward Dorn (1929-1999) was born in Eastern Illinois in 1929 and grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He studied at Black Mountain College with Charles Olson. For several years he travelled through the far West of America, following the winds of writing and employment. He taught at various universities in America and the UK (Essex) where he wrote the first book of his epic Gunslinger), before accepting a professorship in 1978 at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he continued teaching until his death in December 1999. He is the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and translation. Writing about Dorn’s work in The Guardian , Patrick McGuinness observed that ‘what you get from Dorn is not available anywhere else in poetry.’

‘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.

Into This Suspended Vacuum

January 26, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for John Wieners

Whatever militates against our dreamier pleasures I have
Become the same meaning utopia’s crude petroleum jolts
Coded rubber heat singing things that turn blind eyes to waste
Erasing worlds being serial resolves my fate in theory I think

I want to love and loving kiss yr many addled hallucinations
Hunger fulfillment’s no longer a glamour hangs dependence
On feeding the thing eternally expressing selves in public
Johns voices saying before you decide to leave me leave

Me a rag some hair a duct or mass producing anything external
Can’t arouse thus corrodes the tongue with news I can’t be
Warm or think my own repression cause it’s too hot inside this
War to dream communications a soiled body nobody wants

To express can’t be itself in goods another total embracing
Wants to believe belief enough to become the world we can’t

~~— cause the cops can’t fucking fathom.~~
by Rob Halpern

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem series! Look out for the next instalment of the Next Generation Poets 2014 tour. There are 11 more stops coming up across the country, including readings by Brookes’ own Hannah Lowe and Patience Agbabi (Next Generation Poet in 2004). For the full schedule, visit the Next Generation Poets 2014 website.

Rob Halpern is the author of the Common Place tetralogy, published in the USA over the last eight years, and co-author (with Taylor Brady) of Snow Sensitive Skin. Recent essays and translations by Halpern have appeared in Chicago Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Claudius App, and an essay by Sam Ladkin on the Common Place series can be found online in World Picture Journal 8. You can read more about [––––––––]: Placeholder on the Enitharmon website, hear Halpern read on PennSound, and find out more about his work from his page on the Eastern Michigan University website.

The Boston Globe, selecting Halpern’s book Music for Porn as one its Poetry Books of 2012, commented that: ‘Halpern was as fearless as they came in 2012. His stunning third collection was both statement and experiment – a gruesome, erotic, studied, unflinching dissection of the ways that violence, sex, and social order tear at each other. Halpern uses the body as a battleground, and the soldier as a stand-in for a range of repressed (and fulfilled) desires. Light reading, it is not; enlightening, challenging, and upsetting, it will be for years to come.’

from American Sampler

July 28, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Last, my father combs out the long flax.
I think of my grandfather’s beard, white and silky,
and how as a young man he took with his own hands
stones and boulders from the earth, combing
the earth through with his fingers.

Mist hangs over the open, soft, serious farmland
like a sermon I breathe. My mother settles
to spin the flax, wetting her fingers
so the fibres twist and cling.

So this coarse linen still has their touch in it,
where I touch and bleed and belong.
by Jane Duran

Announcing the Poets’ Corner Open Mic Night at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. Blackwell’s writes: ‘Join us on the first Tuesday of every month for our ‘Poets’ Corner’ open mic poetry night. We invite you to stand up and read your work or to come along and enjoy being part of the audience listening. If you feel brave and would like to be a speaker on the night, please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Services Department on 01865 333623 to put your name on the list. Places are normally booked in advance so please get in touch to avoid disappointment. The next meeting is on Tuesday 5th August at 7pm, and is free to attend.’

Notes from Enitharmon:

Jane Duran was brought up in the USA and Chile, and now lives in England. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, and selections have been published in Poetry Introduction 8 (Faber and Faber, 1993), Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe, 1997), and in La Generacion del Cordero (Trilce Ediciones, Mexico, 2000). Her debut collection, Breathe Now, Breathe (Enitharmon, 1995) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon published her second collection Silences from the Spanish Civil War in 2002. Jane’s last collection Graceline was published last year by Enitharmon and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. You can hear Jane Duran read from her work at the Poetry Archive.

Her latest book, American Sampler, will be published in early September, and you can find out more about the collection and pre-order it via the Enitharmon website. Jane Duran’s childhood memories of rural New England permeate American Sampler, bringing the reader in close to its landscapes, weather and light. The book is about vanishing worlds, and the struggle of memory and craft and imagination to understand and hold fragments of the past and turn them into fresh, breathing moments.

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.

Sooner or Later Frank

April 14, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You end up listening to his quotient
of rainy day, blue-mooded songs,
Sinatra sounding like he’s in a bar
by drizzly New York docks, the voice
a lived-in confidential baritone
that always seems familiar,
bourbon-shot, 2am reminiscent,
resigned, resistant to the hurt
her phrases neutrally, for bashed about
means changing partners like a shirt,
a red and white striped Brooks Brothers affair,
the tie dropped like a hanging man,
the attitude an emotional outlaw
who never gets the answers right
and talks them into blue and indigo
inflections, gangsterish felt hat
angled defiantly, tipped north or south
for studio or for mafia wear,
and always integral to the Frank look
that’s in the voice: he’s right in life,
so centred in it, he’s like a peach stone
pivotal to brimming texture,
but at the same time sitting in alone
on loneliness, an Alka Seltzer glass
fizzing to opalescence in the hand,
the woman gone, her Chanel scent
left as a fuzzy hangover. It’s loss
he builds on and converts to gain,
but still it’s trouble, win or lose, and both
feed into song – the ones you hear –
his pick-up fuming, just a casual bit,
her lipstick bleeding on a coffee cup,
downtown, while he sits sorting out his socks
to the soundtrack of steady New York rain.

by Jeremy Reed

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem after its impromptu early Easter break. We’re pleased to tell you about a new poetry event for Oxford! Pass On A Poem gathers together people interested in poetry with the aim of sharing favourite poems by reading them aloud. You can also attend just to sample the selections. This first Oxford meeting will take place on Wednesday 11th June. For more details, and to let people know which poem you’d like to share, contact: james.orton@blackwell.co.uk You can also visit the Pass On A Poem website.

‘Sooner or Later Frank’ is copyright © Jeremy Reed, 2014, and reprinted from his book Sooner or Later Frank (2014) by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. Björk simply called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001), Duck and Sally Inside (2004) and This is How You Disappear (2007), all from Enitharmon Press. He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley. Jeremy Reed is currently Marine Society Poet Laureate. Sooner or Later Frank is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and you can find out more about it from the Enitharmon website and more about Jeremy Reed from his own website.

Jeremy Reed’s new book will be launched on Thursday 1 May at The Enitharmon Gallery Bookshop,  which is located at 10 Bury Place,  London, WC1A 2JL. The event is not ticketed – entry is free, but places must be reserved by emailing  Lavinia Singer on  info@enitharmon.co.uk You can find more details 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.

from Night Office

February 17, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We were assembled on the station platform.
He told us not to leave, but rather wait
for his return, whose signs would take that form
we should know when we saw them. We should wait,
wait only, for that certain day; no storm,
however violent, should now create
an instant’s doubt of his assured return.
It was magnificent; we felt that we should learn

in due course every needed detail, nor
should we at this time question him, but stand
receiving & accepting, and know more
at just those times and seasons when his hand
should by his agents from that further shore
send news, signs, tokens, which might still strike land
here in our clandestine assembly, tell
us of the last new happenings in hell.

Whether in Khabarovsk or in New York,
some word should come, some emissary find
one of our number: as the stooping hawk
finds out the field mouse, so his keen love’s kind
and irresistible dexterity
should at each crossed road or each dubious fork
know how to reach that one of all our kind
who would with the correct celerity

alert the rest. The train began to leave.
The last I saw of him, through sparkling glass,
or what I could make out, where time can thieve
no particle of recollection, may not class
it with some set of likeness, nor bereave
me of one colour, one swift stroke or pass,
but still retains each single thought & gesture,
each hard-won glimpse & hardly-spoken texture,

was his retreating smile at once and frown:
where the cheek’s stoicism bore its gloss
set by the brow’s lines where they just turned down
but where the mouth’s serenity took loss
for gain in knowledge; so without a sound
his lips formed one word which it was impossible
to make out, though eye strain and ear
work its drums over so it might come near

that latest testament.

by Simon Jarvis

A reminder that several Poetry Centre events are taking place during the Oxford Human Rights Festival, including a talk by Poetry Centre Director, Dr Eóin Flannery, about the divisive political and human rights figure, Roger Casement, on Monday 24 February, and a reading and discussion with Jamie McKendrick about his 2007 collection Crocodiles and Obelisks on Friday 28 February. To book tickets, visit the festival page.

Oxford Brookes students from the Department of English and Modern Languages have launched a project to encourage year 7 and 8 Oxford Academy pupils to get excited about creative writing and literature – and they need your help to fund the project! The scheme could culminate in an event at the Oxford Literary Festival. You can find out more about the project – and how to make it happen – on the Hubbub site.

‘from Night Office‘ is copyright © Simon Jarvis, 2013, and reprinted from his book Night Office, published by Enitharmon Books in 2013.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Simon Jarvis is Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University. He has published studies of Wordsworth, Adorno, and Shakespearean criticism. His previous poetry publications include The Unconditional (2005) and Dionysus Crucified (2011).

Simon Jarvis writes that: ‘Night Office is the initial publication from among a small set of long poems for which the collective title is The Calendar. Each poem relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. Each explores those manners in which the invisible life of the soul throws off from itself tunes, colours, times, histories and nations; each, from verse constraints upon syllable and intonation, works towards the concrete freedoms of poetic thinking. Night Office listens out, through its long white night, for the silencing of human sounds – as these last fall asleep into their signs.’ You can read a review of the book from the Cambridge Humanities Review 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.

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.

Epitaph upon the value of heirlooms

December 16, 2013April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I do not believe in historical darkness
or I do but not weaving itself like lasting hurt
through darkness in the bathroom to find its liberating root in my
impressionable mind or what my grandma did
and felt, hurt drank or any of that I drink
not for an escape into darkness or the genes I parade
they don’t care about me and the feeling’s mutual. Yes it’s clear
that darkest things have happened before. In the room
yesterday after work I got
home and laid
myself among the beanbag. My fall brought up
a cloud of dust I lay watching the sun
and the dust in the light
particles in their own lights until in depthless looking
looked the same as stars or cosmic rays
(whose origins are unknown) and the pleasure
of a poem and the pleasure of looking into space
paralyzed for a long time with a gaggling tongue.
I decide this morning or hear myself thinking
I do not believe in historical darkness. Or I hear
between the bathroom and the past a sinking
option of inevitability but it’s optional.

Then back in bed I want
a history of darkness
to make an us inevitable
bursting light through and inaction
and when I think I miss you it’s like family.
Acid of wanting always and how
much harder it is now.
Than when I wanted feelings, now
that when I want it’s all. Or that
I used to want it all now
only some of it is possible.

by Marianne Morris

The latest Poetry Centre podcast, a special recording made of a reading given by the Forward Prize and Costa Book Award-winner Jo Shapcott, is now available to hear. Visit the podcasts page for more details.

‘Epitaph upon the value of heirlooms’ is copyright © Marianne Morris, 2013, and reprinted from her book The On All Things Said Moratorium, published by Enitharmon Books in 2013.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Marianne Morris studied English at Cambridge to MA level and went on to complete her PhD, concerning the intersection of poetry and politics, at the University of Falmouth. She publishes poetry pamphlets through Bad Press, and has been gaining recognition for her own work for ten years. She lives between London and California. You can read more about her work from her blog.

Marianne Morris has been writing, performing and publishing poetry for over ten years. The On All Said Things Moratorium is her first collection. Morris writes about the collection thus: ‘As the documentation of culture, as the source material of history, and as a medium of resistance, we know that words have the power to shape us. The way that we speak to people shapes the way that they treat us, the way that we speak about ourselves creates certain permissions and impossibilities in our own lives. Therefore, the specific, intentioned, and pointed use of language may also constitute an attempt to change certain ideas – political or otherwise – that depend on language for their perpetuation.’ -M.M.

‘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 publisher’s 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.

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.

John Betjeman at Trebetherick

October 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.
‘Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care,’ the breakers say;
A mile of sunny, empty sand away;
Joan, Tom, Ralph, Alistair and Phoebe play,
But Biddy whispers to the foam-flecked breeze,
‘We’re sorry, sorry, sorry. Come back please.’
A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.

Red Admirals basking with their wings apart;
Up on the links it’s been like this all week.
Plus fours and baggy caps look very smart:
(Red Admirals basking with their wings apart)
As serious golfers make an early start;
The niblick and the mashie and the cleek
Where light and dappled shade play hide-and-seek.
Red admirals basking with their wings apart
Up on the links. It’s been like this all week.

Then the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat,
A grave, a stile, a dandelion clock
Then the cool silence of St Enodoc
A clergyman attends his little flock:
The Psalms, the Lesson, the Magnificat,
The Creed, the Prayers, the Anthem, all of that
In the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat.

by John Whitworth

The Wantage (not just) Betjeman Festival gets underway this week, and the programme for Sunday 20 October features a number of poetry events, including readings from former Poetry Centre Fellow Fiona Sampson (some of whose poems you can read on the Poetry Centre site); an event entitled Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq, which includes work by British poet Jenny Lewis and Iraqi poet Adnan al Sayegh to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2003 UK/US invasion of Iraq; and a collaboration between Peter Wyton, former Poet Laureate of Gloucestershire, and Cheltenham Poetry Festival Co-Director Robin Gilbert, celebrating history in verse. In the evening, there will be a poetry slam. You can find out more about the Festival and book tickets for it via the Festival website.

If you are a poet yourself, you may be interested in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the winner of which receives £2500. The judges this year are Deryn Rees-Jones and George Szirtes, and the deadline for entries is Monday 21 October. More details and the rules are to be found on the Coffee-House Poetry site.

Notes from Enitharmon:

The first line of each verse of ‘John Betjeman at Trebetherick’ is from Betjeman’s poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc’s Church, Cornwall’. Cornwall was, unsurprisingly, the first of the Guides to English Counties he edited and in some cases, including this one, wrote for the Shell Oil Company. Names in the first stanza are of children he knew from holidays at Trebetherick, Biddy [Walsham] not quite the first of his freckled, boyish blondes.

John Whitworth has published nine books of poems, edited two Faber anthologies and written a book on writing verse. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, the TLS, London Magazine and the Spectator among many others. He has been awarded the Cholmondeley Prize and The Silver Wyvern, Poetry on the Lake. You can read more by John Whitworth at the poetry pf site.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. You can sign up to the publisher’s 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.