Miss Armstrong: Invisible woman

June 25, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Maya Angelou

The after-office diners by the window
laugh and move in duplicate,
blonde highlights echoed by the glass.

But I have no reflection, not a glimmer.
They have twins against the night
where I, who dine alone, have none.

I search for traces of my movement,
lift my beer glass. It exists.
Its substance glints in recognition.

None of me reveals itself.
The girls’ reflections leave with them
while I remain a silent shadow.

I’m invisible, unseen,
uncertain as a ghost that plays
from time to time along the walls.

by Kathy Gee

The Poetry Centre recently launched its International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

We also recently announced the winners of our first PoetryFilm competition in which filmmakers responded to poetry from our ignitionpress poets. You can view the winning films – by Gabrielle Turner, Marie Craven, and Jane Glennie, here.

Finally, don’t forget about the final few events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic (perhaps you heard it dramatized on BBC Radio 4 last week?), and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. There are a few spaces left for this event here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here. Finally, we’re launching three new ignitionpress pamphlets by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Joanna Ingham, and Sarah Shapiro on 22 and 23 July. More information here!

Kathy Gee studied history and archaeology, later turning this into a career in museums, heritage and leadership coaching. Having published books, articles and pamphlets on the local history of South Devon and National Trust properties in Cornwall, she now lives in Worcestershire and started writing poetry in 2011. Widely published online and in print, her first collection, Book of Bones, was published by V. Press in 2016. In the same year, she wrote the spoken word elements for a contemporary choral piece, Suite For The Fallen Soldier. You can hear Kathy read a poem from her new pamphlet, Checkout, here.

Poet Rhian Edwards writes that Kathy Gee’s new pamphlet ‘Checkout is a sequence of character portraits and vignettes based on the ephemeral characters that cross a corner shop’s bell-chiming threshold. Told from every side of the social spectrum, this is a play for voices, voices in verses, a cross between Under Milk Wood and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. This is a bold and brave collection from the distinctive voice of Kathy Gee.’ Read more about the pamphlet on the V. Press website.

V. Press publishes poetry and flash fiction that is very very, with emphasis on quality over any particular style. Established with a launch at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2013 and shortlisted in The Michael Marks Publishers’ Award 2017, V. Press poetry knows what it wants to do and does it well. For more, visit the V. Press website.

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 New Violin

March 26, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Total eclipse, May–November 1919

Empires have fallen
and birds hold their breath
as discs embrace in a darkness
that questions the weight of light.
Principe Island: Through cloud. Hopeful.
Sobral, Brazil: Eclipse splendid.

The data speak and Moses descends
from the mountain with a paradigm
carved in Riemannian stone.
Only twelve people understand it
and the public has begun to doubt
that two times two still equals four.

The data speak and starlight bends
to the will of strange geometries,
the language of tensor calculus.
Newton is dragged into the light,
fails to compete with the prophesies
of the Suddenly Famous Dr Einstein.

At forty, the way ahead is clear,
a new wife walking at his side.
To celebrate, he buys another violin
and glances back, half-expecting to glimpse
Mileva limping a few steps behind.
He sees only admirers.

by Martin Zarrop

News! The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run two poetry workshops for families on 9 and 15 April in Oxfordshire County Library. We’ll be encouraging participants to write brand new poems, ready for the IF Oxford Poetry of Science Competition. So if you know anyone aged 6-16 who is keen on poetry and science, please bring them along! You can sign up here.

Thenon 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our Eventbrite page.

Martin Zarrop is a retired mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006 and can’t stop. His pamphlet No Theory of Everything (2015) was one of the winners of the 2014 Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition. His first full collection Moving Pictures was published by Cinnamon Press in October 2016. Read more about Making Waves on the V. Press website.

Travelling North

September 10, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No-man’s land, each moment a rosary bead
between what was, what will be:

a man waves as the train passes, I lift a hand,
he and his dog shrink, fall away;

a plane spools a white thread, a hundred bodies
cross a continent, time stretches while they sleep.

Shadows congeal, a horse droops in a grey blanket,
a farmhouse with yellow eyes crouches in trees.

I see hammered water, hills creased with streams,
antlers against cloud, a scurf of snow on the tops.

This weathered land hardly registers our passing,
moves at the pace of rocks and mountainsides,

we are irrelevant, and that feels good.

by Jenna Plewes

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem! We hope you had a very good summer!

Join the Poetry Centre’s own ignitionpress, this week’s publisher, V. Press, and a host of our other Weekly Poem publishers like Seren, Sidekick Books, Nine Arches, Smokestack (and more!) at this year’s Free Verse: Poetry Book and Magazine Fair. The event, run by the Poetry Society and taking place in London on 22 September, promises to be a wonderful celebration of poetry in the UK. Three of our ignitionpress poets: Mary Jean Chan, Lily Blacksell, and Natalie Whittaker, will also be reading from their pamphlets.

Then do make a note in your diary to be with us at Oxford Brookes on 31 October for a special event with poet Jay Bernard. Jay will be presenting Surge, an award-winning multimedia project dealing with the 1981 New Cross ‘massacre’ – a fire at a birthday party in south London which killed 13 young black people. Tickets are free, but you must sign up in advance via the website.

Notes from V. Press:

Jenna Plewes is a widely published and prize-winning poet. A career in psychotherapy and love of the natural world inform her work and she is at her happiest in quiet places, like the sea, mountains and moorlands. She and her husband live in Worcestershire, with their collie. They have two children and four grandchildren. She has two collections with IDP and her V. Press pamphlet, Against the Pull of Time.

You can read more about her pamphlet on the V. Press website, and more about Jenna’s work on her website.

young woman views Chagall

June 25, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

at Blue Lovers, she is appalled
in a bright room, that storm colour
bruises her cotton suit
the shade of sloe

pictured: a face of static
lips nibbed, eyes closed
mother
it is not, in fact, paint’s pressure
filling, but the nimbus
in her own chest
a wilderness, made numb
it is I

centre right: a muted harlequin
with stiffened ruff, the mask
a blot of dusk
whom you clothed

the young woman touches her cheek
mimicking the gloved mime
who cups that of a widow

her mother’s fascinator is neat
leaves, nature hemmed
indelible as hedgerow
so I cannot speak

as though, in blackthorn
a spider wove her sack
to an iron pin
the young
never found the world
these are my gauzed hands

the room bright, her suit
hoards shadows
tissue in a blue well

by Gram Joel Davies

You can view Chagall’s 1914 painting Blue Lovers, from which this poem draws inspiration, here.

Notes from V. Press:

Gram Joel Davies grew up in Somerset in the ’80s, overlooking the valley town of Taunton, the Quantock Hills and the edge of Sedgemoor. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Magma, The Moth, Envoi and Lighthouse, and has received listings and commendations from Penelope Shuttle, Peter Oswald, Liz Berry and Carol Ann Duffy. In 2014, he and Hannah Linden won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Compound collaboration competition. Working with Juncture 25 poets, he attends readings and festivals across the Southwest. Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) is his first collection. You can read more about it on the V. Press website, and more about Gram’s work on his website. He is also on Twitter.

Building Materials

May 14, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I lie on the kitchen floor,
my back shrinking from cold quarry stone,
I can see the night’s purple sky.

The roof isn’t yet fixed. He tries,
works hard against the weather,
but this is only one of many jobs.

His arms, that used to reach for me,
are always full of bricks,
his mouth full of clay.

I watch the moon through fallen tiles.
Tomorrow we must steady them
against the threat of rain.

by Claire Walker

News from the Centre: we urge you not to miss the chance to hear three of the leading poets writing in the UK when they visit us in Oxford next week. Do tell your friends! Tickets to hear Kei Miller (22 May), Sinéad Morrissey (23 May), and Clare Pollard (24 May) are free, but you do need to book. Book for Kei here, Sinéad here, and Clare here, or all three here!

These readings are part of the Think Human Festival at Oxford Brookes, during which we’re also helping to run an exciting event on 25 May called Stanza and Stand-Up, in which poetry and comedy battle it out! Tickets are available here.

Finally, tomorrow at Keble College, Stephanie Burt (US) and Hera Lindsay Bird (New Zealand) will be reading from their work at 6.30pm in the Pusey Room – full details here.

Notes from V. Press:

Claire Walker is a poet based in Worcestershire. Her work has been published in magazines and on websites including The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Ink Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, The Poetry Shed, Obsessed with Pipework and Clear Poetry, and in anthologies such as The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press) and Crystal Voices (Crystal Clear Creators). She is a Poetry Reader for Three Drops Press, and Co-Editor of Atrium poetry webzine. Her most recent pamphlet – from which this poem was taken – is entitled Somewhere Between Rose and Black, and it was shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her first pamphlet, The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile, is also published by V. Press. You can read more about Claire’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

The last fare collector of Hiroshima

April 11, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They found her fingers in a jelly of yen,
her skin one with the standard issue fare-bag –
a dove in a sen of silver to go to the mountains,
oh, if only she went.

I have read of a woman
who cooled her burns with figs and persimmon.
She pared away old skin for years; it was the finest paper,
writing its kanji into the papyrus sky. I wish I knew her.

In the ritual of tea-making,
I learnt how to sip from a widow’s eyes
and learn that some stories are like Hiroshima streetcars –
they always arrive on time then the hour takes them.

They found her omen in the evening crow
hopping by the river: it is time to see how atoms rise
when another survivor dies;
their story closes with their eyelids.

I have read of a God-fearing woman
who feared man so much more;
she sliced a cucumber each night for years to cool her skin
and hate had left her years ago with five generations of
fishermen
horse-breakers
librarians
mothers
fathers
fare-collector.

by Antony Owen

Sen: Old Japanese coins. The sen was taken out of currency in 1953.

Poetry news! If you’re around St. Andrews or Edinburgh, catch our ignitionpress poets (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan and Patrick James Errington) today (Wednesday) and tomorrow as they launch their pamphlets in Scotland! Find more details on the St. Andrews reading here and the Edinburgh event here. You can buy their pamphlets here.

There are still a few places left for this Saturday’s one-day poetry workshop by ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley. The workshop is entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’, and will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Sphinx Theatre will presents the award winning show ‘A Berlin Kabaret’, a vibrant presentation of lyrical anti-war songs, at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 20 and 21 April. The show features previously undiscovered and newly translated poems by Bertolt Brecht and provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. There is more information on the OFS website.

Finally, John Hegley is in town this Saturday with his family-friendly show ‘All Hail the Snail’, and you can find more information about the event on the North Wall Arts Centre’s website.

Notes from V. Press:

Antony Owen was born in 1973 in Coventry, and raised by working class parents. The Nagasaki Elder is his fifth collection of poetry, jointly inspired by growing up in Cold War Britain at the peak of nuclear proliferation and, more recently, a self-funded trip to Hiroshima in 2015 to hear testimonies of Atomic bomb survivors. Owen’s war poetry and haiku have been translated into Japanese and Mandarin. In recognition of his 2015 peace trip to Hiroshima, CND Peace Education (UK) selected Owen as one of their first national patrons, and he won a Peace & Reconciliation award in 2016 for Community Cohesion from his home city of Coventry. The Nagasaki Elder was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2017.