Lip Service, or La Haine

February 13, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Kiss you, take your children.
Riotous though it is, this shit’s not for kids.

La Haine is bloating through drive-in speakers, serenading ‘68
miasma, she and Humbert staring down the barrel of the same
animal gun, wincing.

I will cross you if you come over all drunk-like,
tarantella con dolcezza with your latest organ grinder.
Find Slovenia with your head full of black, black wine
— dim donkey piñata —
an industry of collagen in scapegoat giallo.

How can I follow the winters,
archangel of interns; doubting Thomas
and his motives. Intimate metastasis
intrigues the censor, his biting wounds
inwardly glow

and Venus infers her worth from a table.
Her onus, her offending isotopes,
eyes big as gum balls, swings rapidly,
a timeshare in blazing saddles and
neat little ellipticals.

I hope, I know as you do,
we’ll settle kindly out of court;
— you form –isms like Christmas —
sweet Mary shares her sweat with an ostler,
a meek swearing cross to milk.

by Charlotte Newman

Poetry news! Award-winning Danish poet Pia Tafdrup visits the UK this week in a short tour organized by the Poetry Centre. Pia will be in Reading on Wednesday, reading with Peter Robinson, will be in discussion with Fiona Sampson in Ledbury on Thursday, and will be reading withPhilip Gross in Oxford on Friday. For more details, visit the dedicated page on the Centre’s website. To coincide with Pia’s visit, the Story Museum is running two exciting workshops for primary-age children about the work of Hans Christian Andersen (a significant source of inspiration for Pia Tafdrup). The workshops, based on Andersen’s stories ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’ take place on Friday 17 February from 11-12.15pm and1-2.15pm, and are suitable for children aged 5-8. Visit the Story Museum website for more information and to book places. Tickets are £6.

Poet and critic Sean O’Brien is giving the Weidenfeld Lectures at St Anne’s College here in Oxford over the next few weeks. Tomorrow his lecture is entitled ‘Displacement: Irish poetry and poets of Irish descent in Britain.’ The events takes place at 5.30pm in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. He will also be giving a reading with Patrick McGuinness at The Albion Beatnik on Sunday 26 February from 6pm. All are welcome to these events, and you can find more details on the St Anne’s website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Trammel is a radical book of poetry for an uncertain future. Voracious in her critique of modernity, Charlotte Newman ranges across the spectra of social and sexual politics – from Brexit to the Bechdel Test via Renaissance art and vintage computer games. These poems are stylish, muscular and linguistically agile. Always driven by a musical engine, Newman weaves the hard language of politics, technology, finance, science and the law into a new lyric texture. Urbane yet uncompromising, Trammel is the powerful debut collection from a voice that demands to be heard. You can read more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, and read a further sample here.

Charlotte Newman was born in Surrey in 1986. She read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge and holds an MA with Distinction in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Birkbeck, University of London. She won the inaugural Sabotage Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2013 and was featured in The Salt Book ofYounger Poets in 2011. After a brief stint indexing the entire back catalogue of The Erotic Review, she worked as a journalist and publicist for a leading family law rm, writing articles for national newspapers while also contributing freelance reviews to The Observer, The New Statesman and Poetry Review, among others; she was shortlisted for The Scotsman’s Allen Wright Award for theatre criticism. Charlotte lives in London with her husband, the poet James Brookes, and works as a political communications consultant, specialising in healthcare. Trammel is her first full collection. You can follow Charlotte on Twitter.

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.

My Girl

January 10, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

in the nineties Aunty Ann had all eight
rooms wired into the same Sky station
but since we didn’t know we spent each night
of our weekend watching girls undress
while bored men phoned in, telling them to
climb between each other’s legs/and/or
take a nipple into a yielding/heterosexual
mouth, force a simple moan perfected in adolescence.
We had our double bed with its chintz canopy,
our newly pink hair rubbing onto the pillowcases,
the crochet eiderdown heavy upon our
satisfied bodies; she was
sometimes jealous if I looked at the TV
for too long. We’d discuss
which parts in relation to the girls’ parts were normal
or in the dull and balmy half-light of morning
through semi-drawn blinds
which parts looked beautiful

by Melissa Lee-Houghton

Two exciting announcements from the Centre! This Saturday 14 January, the Poetry Centre is privileged to present a reading by internationally-acclaimed critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Nancy Campbell. The event will begin at 7pm at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford, and all are welcome. £2 on the door. More details are available on our Facebook page.

We are also delighted to announce that celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students), and spaces are limited! Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision. This book, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, was also selected as one of the best poetry books of 2016 by both the Guardianand the Poetry School, and includes ‘i am very precious’, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.

You can find out more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, where you can also read further poems from the collection.

MelissaLee-Houghton was announced as a Next Generation Poet in 2014. Her first and second collections are published by Penned in the Margins. BeautifulGirls was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poem ‘i am very precious’ was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award for her fiction. She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

You can hear Melissa read from her work on the Poetry Archive, read more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Self-Portrait at Primary School

October 24, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was so obliging I let the weirdest, smelliest kid pick on me
because I thought it might make him feel better.
He smelled like an opened can. They called him the weirdo.

Instead of the red sweatshirt with the school logo on the right breast,
he had a generic red jumper which wasn’t even the right shade of red.

I remember the grain of the wood on the prefab classroom’s base
against my scalp as he gently, then firmly, rolled my head against it.
I remember the rolling turned to knocking, a tuft of my hair in his fist.

I didn’t say: Don’t do that because that hurts me. I didn’t
want to hurt his feelings. I remember smiling quizzically at him
and he beamed back, delighted with this human doll.

The relationship continued for a week until a dinner lady
marched us both to my teacher. The Weirdo was sent for counselling
and never allowed to go near me again.

And even at the time it struck me: maybe I was the dangerous one.
by Luke Kennard

News from the Centre! This week join us at Oxford Brookes for two terrific readings. First, acclaimed conceptual poet and public artist Ira Lightman will be with us on Wednesday at lunchtime (12-1pm, Special Collections, basement of the Main Library, Headington Campus). Then Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Sarah Corbett will read from her verse novel And She Was on Friday between 2.30-3.30pm (JHB 201, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus). The readings are free, and everyone is very welcome to attend! Please share the news with colleagues and friends.

Luke Kennard has published five collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. He lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. His debut novel, The Transition, is published in 2017 by Fourth Estate. Read more about Cain on the Penned in the Margins website, and hear Luke read from his work on the Poetry Archive website.

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.

Some Days I’m Visited by a Church of Rain

September 26, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ 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.

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.

The Museum of Bus Stop Queues

April 4, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bowling pins holding on to small suns.

Almost all of their work
addresses the theme of retaliation.

They sip time through a straw.

Their book has all the symptoms
of a forgotten ice cream.

‘Our main weakness is probably the universe.’

What of their best quality?

They look upstream.

They are always looking upstream.

by Claire Trévien

This is the final poem from a special trio featuring work by poets who are appearing at one of the two Poetry Centre events in the Oxford Literary Festival. Claire Trévien will be reading alongside Sarah Hesketh and Harry Man tomorrow (Tuesday 5 April) at 4pm. There are more details on the Oxford Literary Festival website. We hope to see you there!

‘The Museum of Bus Stop Queues’ is copyright © Claire Trévien, 2016. It is reprinted from Astéronymes (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by permission of Penned in the Margins.

Astéronyme, n. (French). A sequence of asterisks used to hide a name or password. In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Shipwrecked House, Trévien becomes curator of imaginary museums, indexing objects and histories with a quixotic energy. The stunning central sequence recounts a journey across the Scottish island of Arran, where myths are carved into remote caves and a mountain hides behind a ‘froufrou of gas’. Formally inventive and intricately composed, Astéronymes is a book of redactions – and an elegy for places and people that have been ruined by time, erosion or neglect.

Claire Trévien is an Anglo-Breton poet, editor, reviewer, workshop leader and live literature producer. She is the author of the pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery and of The Shipwrecked House, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She edits Sabotage Reviews, and in November 2013, she was the Poetry School’s first digital poet-in-residence. Her second collection, Astéronymes, has just been published. You can read more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, and more about Claire on her own site.

from Gilles de Rais

October 20, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the magician television show which isn’t true to life.

This is the best of all says prelati
mixing tobacco
too many fish in the sea apparently
to keep
the quench clenched
oh well no use in crying
now 30 years or 300 years later unless there’s
some hard money involved
but I am not able
to forget, Gilles in drowing
in his dreaming
of the happy society kissed as a king

shot in the ribs in revenge.

my organs like this, two ribs, rhymes
and emily’s
racist baby workout
is a future collected book
like this a postcard sized box that is completely
empty as a hospital bed
can be empty soon
enough if you don’t watch you mouth & if so
I’ll be on quick as a flash
evidence for it in my past

by SJ Fowler

Two news items: Hannah Lowe, Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing, andJennifer Wong, PhD student in English and Creative Writing,will be taking part in the Reading Poetry Festival on Saturday 8 November 2014 in a special Poetry Centre reading. You can find out more about the festival, and book tickets, on the dedicated website.

From St Aldates Church in Oxford: This winter sees the publication of an Advent Poetry Anthology and we are currently accepting submissions towards this project. This is open to all ages, and although poems don’t have to be overtly Christian, they should reflect the themes of the advent season. The closing date for poetry submissions is Sunday 9 November. For more information or to submit a poem please email poetry@staldates.org.uk

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Gilles de Rais’ is a collaborative work with poems by SJ Fowler and artwork from David Kelly, and comes from the anthology, Enemies . This ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary collection is the result of collaborations between SJ Fowler and over thirty artists, photographers and writers. Diary entries mingle with a partially-redacted email exchange; texts slip and fragment, finding new contexts alongside prints, paintings, diagrams, Rorschach blots, YouTube clips and behind-the-scenes photographs at the museum. Find out more from the Penned in the Margins website, watch SJ Fowler read from the poem, and follow his work on his website and on Twitter.

SJ Fowler is a poet and artist living in London. He has published four collections of poetry, most recently the limited-edition Recipes (Red Ceilings, 2012). He has produced poetry, sonic art, installation and performance artworks for Tate, the Voiceworks project and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3:AM Magazine and also works as a martial arts instructor, and as an employee of the British Museum.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond. The company is currently touring two productions: Shlock!, a powerful feminist satire for the cut and paste generation, and The Shipwrecked House, a one-woman performance that blends poetry with theatre, in which Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien navigates a shifting maritime landscape. You can find out more about these productions on the Penned in the Margins website.

Penned in the Margins’s recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on Facebook and Twitter.

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 ‘Cybosaurus’

July 21, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The city chooses through whom it speaks. Hollow arteries, emotion suggestion, flaccid temper.

Once it’s chosen the atom-human-cyborg machine (call it Cybosaurus?) the city must drain-pipe,
throat-sliver him-her-it.

(what am I saying?

Speak without consequence.
Speak immediacy. Speak rhythm.
Speak in skulls. Speak dope. Speak easy.
Speak unruly. Speak in scales. Speak mutant disco.

Speak Chewbacca. Speak tornado. Speak conquistador.
Speak simulacra. Speak in fish dialect.
Speak Isadora, Q-lab, Dalston dirty condom-

(-inium)

Speak

rat-a-

tat-tat-tat…

Speak Angola. Speak fishnet stockings.
Speak zumba. Speak protons. Speak androids.
Speak cyber-graffiti.
Speak haemorrhoids.

Speak string theory. Speak antinomies. Speak Plato’s retreat.
Speak anglo-saxon, Michael Jackson, tooty-frooty.
fornication.

Speak cellular Andromeda.
Speak black-hole flash fiction.

Speak auto-autopsy psychobabble-fish.

Speak in
neutrinos, in marmalade, in hot-flavour sado-masoch-
ism,

speak grizzlybear.
by Siddhartha Bose

Reading-based publisher Two Rivers Press is launching its new book The Arts of Peace next Monday 28 July from 6.30-8.30 in the Museum of English Rural Life garden in Reading. There will be a terrific range of readers, including Vahni Capildeo, Peter Carpenter, John Greening, A F Harrold, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Peter Robinson, and Susan Utting. Tickets are £3, and there are more details on the MERL website.

Two Rivers will also be hosting an event about poetry and the First World War at Acton Court in Reading, ‘Blast from the Past’, on Friday 1 August at 7.30pm. Tickets are £12, and readers include Adrian Blamires, Claire Dyer, Ian House, and Peter Robinson. Booking details are on the Acton Court site, and you can find out more about the book The Arts of Peace on the Two Rivers website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Cybosaurus’ is an apocalyptic trawl through a future London in the form of a poetry sequence in thirteen parts. The whole poem can be found in Siddhartha Bose’s second collection Digital Monsoon , published by Penned in the Margins. In this follow-up to the acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city. You can watch Siddhartha Bose read extracts from the book on his website, Kalagora.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond.

Their recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on Facebook and Twitter.

The Shipwrecked House II

May 5, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Frank O’Hara

When waves were far enough away
and the pumpkin seeds still as amber
in the treasure chest, the calls tumblingly
came to crook the paintings, writings, all.

Now your voice falls like a coin to the ocean’s floor
and the house is dragged apart by the fractures
of your smiles – the thought of its absence echoes
unbelievably – our breath opens like a stiff drawer.

You are everywhere and nowhere, you are
the unfinished cup of tea and its straw,
dipped like a paintbrush. I want to keep
the yoghurts that went out of date yesterday.

by Claire Trévien

Near Oxford this week? Come along to OutBurst, the Oxford Brookes Festival at Pegasus, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday. Showcasing cutting-edge research from across the university, the festival features a fantastic range of events and activities for all ages: hear some of Oxford’s best young writers in an event hosted by Kate Clanchy; explore the connections between technology and modernist literature with Eric White; join English PEN for an evening about how publishing and human rights campaigns can join forces; hear the results of a collaboration between the Poetry Centre and the Archway Foundation about mental health; and write a haiku inspired by spring and display it in the Pegasus garden. Visit the website to learn more about these and the many other events this week, and book tickets via the Pegasus Box Office on 01865 812150 (11-4pm).

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘The Shipwrecked House II’ is from Claire Trévien’s debut collection of the same name, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Trévien’s is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. You can read more about the collection on the Penned in the Margins website, and hear Claire discuss her work in a Poetry Centre podcast. You can also follow her via her website or on Twitter.

Hyas Araneus

March 10, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

All animals have a minimum space requirement,
without which survival is impossible.
Bubbles overlap, social animals
need to stay in touch, it varies species to species.

The critical distance is so precise
it can be measured in centimetres.

The English have characteristically demonstrated
that they are not afraid to plan.

In the spring, each male stickleback
carries out a circular territory.

Social distance in man has been extended
by telephone, TV and the walkie-talkie.

In the cold waters of the North sea
lives a form of crab, Hyas Araneus.

At certain times in the life cycle,
the individual becomes vulnerable to others.

Do we grasp because we have hands
or do we have hands because we grasp?

Crabs are solitary crustaceans –
This is 1966. Look at the advantages

held by those that have a territory, a space
of their own. Look at the advantages.

by Hannah Silva

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Hyas Araneus’ is from Forms of Protest, the debut collection from Hannah Silva. Previously a performance-based poet and a theatre writer, this is the first time Silva has translated her highly experimental work for the page. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world.

Hannah Silva’s performance piece Total Man has recently been nominated for the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and you can read more about Hannah Silva’s work from the Penned in the Margins site. There you can also hear Silva discuss the relationship between poetry and performance with Penned’s director, Tom Chivers. You can read Hannah Silva’s thoughts on her blog, and follow her on Twitter.

Town Show ’82

January 20, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The photograph is all the colours of a headache;
muted, almost sepia, a khaki sleeveless jacket, a belt, a camera,
you smoking over my mother’s shoulder.
Hot blood collects behind my eyes.
Until my eleventh year you were dead. Not there
in the misplaced picture in your plimsoll shoes and fat silver watch
you probably couldn’t afford.
I want to be inside this frame, between the two white billygoats,
burn the show tent down, stand in the ashes and say
daddy, it matters not where you have been,
if you come with me now I will write you poems,
push you around in a wheelchair in your old age.
I will sit with you around hospital beds,
contract MRSA and light your cigarettes.
I scan every last centimetre now as though it holds a clue.
Joe, your name is Joe.

by Melissa Lee-Houghton

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Melissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in 1982. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have been published in literary magazines such as Succour, The Short Review, Magma, and Tears in the Fence. Her first collection, A Body Made of You, was published in 2011. She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Beautiful Girls was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Writing about the collection, Chris McCabe has commented that ‘Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching, and where heaven is a place between “the sky and the planets” reserved for those with personality disorders. This collection will be a home-to-home for sufferers and a journey through terrible night for those who’ve been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life.’

You can read more about Melissa Lee-Houghton from her blog, and also follow her on Twitter.