Milia

October 13, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An olive-wood fire and the local
pre-phylloxera survival red against
the cold wind outside, which is enough
of being, as if it were so grand.

Night folds its corners down
the terraced hillsides and
walks upright on the
wandering streams, but

No sound, of stream or wind, reaches here
or almost, and the fire darkens. Breathe words
across my ear, breathe a fear, second by
second, jar by jar, fear of war and world, be explicit.

Let a resistance grow here, far
from world but close to mind, how
close it lies, to hear its breath
against the inner ear,

A breath to banish fear.
Then the streams flow on
and the air follow,
down the valley towards the world.

Thought that distils
against my ear a tear
for the time and
a silent belief in peace. Our cargoes

Were sunk in the seas and now
lie calm under tumult. Our dead
recede behind the night clouds.
Remind me of what I once knew,

Breathe the truth back faintly across
my ear in this walled shelter and hear
the plants shake, the earth tumble.
There is only one peace, a lot further out.

by Peter Riley

This is the second of two poems from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson. There will be a special event at the upcoming Reading Poetry Festival on Sunday 9 November featuring a number of poets whose work is included in the anthology. You can find out more about it and the rest of the events on the festival’s website.

If you are a student or member of staff at Oxford Brookes, enter our poetry competition on the themes of mental health and well-being. The deadline is Friday 13 February 2015, and poems should be submitted via email to: brookespoetrycompetition@gmail.com Find out more on the Poetry Centre website.

Peter Riley was born into an environment of working people in the Manchester area in 1940 and now lives in retirement in Hebden Bridge, having previously lived in Cambridge for many years. He has been a teacher, bookseller, and a few other things and is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, and two of prose concerning travel and music. His most recent book is The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet 2011). He contributes reviews of new poetry to the website The Fortnightly Review regularly. Peter Riley’s own website is April Eye, where you can find out more about his work, and you can also read an interview with him by Keith Tuma in an issue of Jacket magazine from April 2000.

This poem is taken from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson, and published by Two Rivers Press. The first of August 1914 saw the beginning of the war that was to end all wars and which, instead, ushered in a century of armed conflicts, two of them described as global. This anthology’s title is borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, in which he deprecates ‘the inglorious arts of peace’. With this gathering of newly composed poems, and against that grain, this anthology looks to celebrate all that is left behind in times of conflict and which conflict is so often evoked to defend. The more than fifty contributors include Fleur Adcock, Fred D’Aguiar, Gerald Dawe, Jane Draycott, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Allison McVety, Bill Manhire, John Matthias, and Carol Rumens.

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.

Coral Island

October 6, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To our surprise the island was well watered.
The fishes were strangely easy to catch
And the little pigs that gambolled around
In the interior provided nourishment,
As well as fun for my fellow castaways.

The weather was persistently benign,
Stroking our hair and murmuring white noise.
Though my spyglass had suffered from the sea
I could still use it for scanning the waves,
Hoping for a sail or even a monster.

Meantime I memorised our days in paradise
And the little that happened, looking forward
To the book I should write when we were rescued –
A more or less truthful tally of events,
Spiced up or embroidered as need might be.

At night the land crabs rattled round the palms
And the waves were bored by the same old beach.
Peterkin snored guilelessly in our hut
While Jack dreamed in silence about his pig-sticking
And I stared out to sea with an empty mind.

That was before the coming of the cannibals
And our unforeseen arrival at manhood,
When things that should not be seen were seen
And could not be unseen, and our green Eden
Receded into a book for small boys.

by Fergus Allen

Together with the Institute of English Studies in London, the Poetry Centre is organizing a conference from 13-14 March 2015 at the IES to address the three initiatives: New Generation Poets (1994), Next Generation Poets (2004), and Next Generation Poets 2014. It aims to examine important concerns of contemporary poetry arising from these projects, such as the relationship between poetry and the public, the promotion of poetry through initiatives such as these, and what the selection of the particular poets on these lists can tell us about the state and direction of British poetry at various stages over the past twenty years. For more information and the call for papers, please visit the IES website.

Fergus Allen was born in 1921; his father was Irish, his mother English. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he moved to England during the Second World War. He was Director of the Hydraulics Research Station and ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner. In 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He published his first book (with Faber) at the age of seventy-two; the poem here is one of several recent poems that comprise the first section of his New& Selected Poems, which also includes work from five previous collections. You can read more poems from the book on the CBe website, read more about Allen’s work from the CBe blog, and hear him read at the Poetry Archive.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse , a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012, 2013, and this year too, with over 60 publishers taking part.

Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

Quick March

September 29, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Geraniums stood in ranked red rows
inside Victoria’s railed parks
where servants took their Sunday walks
without an aphid on the rose.

My grandfather in brisk young life,
hunched in dugouts, ironed Majors’ clothes,
spotted ‘dead Jerries’, when dawn froze,
then edged his lawns sharp as a knife.

My father kicked down Hamburg’s doors
when they pursued the last SS.
He grew, in ground raked fine as dust,
long beans, parsnips, small potatoes.

The white musk roses bend your border,
bees bumble, where dusk’s crickets trilled.
They marched; from rigid files, fell killed,
so you may garden, in disorder.

by Alison Brackenbury

This Thursday 2 October is National Poetry Day (the theme of which is ‘Remember’), and the Poetry Centre will be marking the occasion with the launch of three projects: a wellbeing poetry competition open to all at Brookes, a Memorable Poem video project in which members of the Brookes community talk and write about the poems which mean the most to them, and a series of pop-up poetry events around the Brookes campuses and across Oxford. You can find out more about all of these on the Poetry Centre website, and will be able to follow our activities on the day via Twitter and Facebook.

Alison Brackenbury’s eighth collection is Then (Carcanet, 2013). New poems can be read at her website, and a new collection will appear in early 2016. You can hear Alison read from her work at the Poetry Archive, and read her reflections on The Great War on her blog entry for April 9 2014. You can also find Alison on Facebook and Twitter.

This poem is taken from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson, and published by Two Rivers Press. The first of August 1914 saw the beginning of the war that was to end all wars and which, instead, ushered in a century of armed conflicts, two of them described as global. This anthology’s title is borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, in which he deprecates ‘the inglorious arts of peace’. With this gathering of newly composed poems, and against that grain, this anthology looks to celebrate all that is left behind in times of conflict and which conflict is so often evoked to defend. The more than fifty contributors include Fleur Adcock, Fred D’Aguiar, Gerald Dawe, Jane Draycott, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Allison McVety, Bill Manhire, John Matthias, and Carol Rumens.

Looking At Late Rembrandts After Leaving Dad At The Nursing Home

September 15, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bodies strained upright
in upright
straight-backed chairs;
struggle to stay
still,
clawing hands
grappling arm rests to brace;
their skin-shrunk
rounded
skulls
concentrated
by some inexpressive
thought,

the life that has lived them,

the eyes stunned
by seeing the what
is not there,
the foreseeable
that has happened
to them;
the eyes in the
struck faces
of the painter’s sitters

alone
alive
with a titanium

glint of light.
by Steven Matthews

Notes from Waterloo Press:

Steven Matthews’s first book of poetry, Skying, emerges from an engagement with the landscape and seascape of North Essex and the Suffolk border, where Steven Matthews was brought up, and which he has always been drawn back to. It combines moments of illumination with voices remaking family and local stories, and so tunes into oral histories of place. The book’s often local voices associate themselves with, but also diverge amazingly from, national versions of trauma and threat. There are also poems here about childhood, being a father, and about grief and loss.

But the collection also sets those particular voices within and against the history of poetry and art which has been similarly engaged. A sequence, ‘Places of Writing’, and related work, explore the relation of a gallery of writers to their locale. As the title of the collection, which uses a word coined by the artist indicates, the painter John Constable stands as presiding spirit behind Skying’s related concerns.

Steven Matthews was born and brought up in Colchester, Essex. Various of his poems have been published in magazines and journals including Stand, Versus, Kunapipi, Oxford Magazine, Poetry and Audience, and Moving Worlds. He has been a regular reviewer for Poetry Review, and Poetry Editor for Dublin Quarterly Magazine. The former Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, Steven Matthews is now Professor in English Literature (Modernism) at the University of Reading.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output. Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook.

Lastu

August 18, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Niitythän oli aivan ihania,
että niissä kukki päiväkukat sen minä muistan
että kerran tuolla kun oli sellainen peltoaukema
mutta mikäs kasvi se sellainen oli
minkä ympärillä ne perhoset
mikäs kasvi se siellä oli ja
sitten sitä metsää hakattiin ja sitten sitä ei enää ollu
mutta kun mä en muista sen nimee
ehkä mä muistan sen sitten
siitä mentiin sillan yli
ja silta vei joen yli ja siinä oli tuomi ja
tuomi sitten kaartui sen joen yli ja sananjalkoja
ja haiseva kurjenpolvi ja laakea kivi polulla
ja mä olen monta kertaa nähnyt unta siitä polusta
toisessa oli hirveesti muurahaisia
toinen oli sellainen ilman muurahaisia
toisessa oli paljon neulasia ja käpyjä mutta se toinen,
se oli hyvin lempee, siinä kasvo päivänkakkaraniitty
siinä vieressä ja siellä erämaassa oli sellainen torppa
isä lähti aina sunnuntaiaamuisin lintuja ampumaan
ja kastematoja oli meillä kotona ja
niitähän kerättiin kun oli pitkä siima, se on
semmoinen siima jossa oli paljon koukkuja
ja kerran tällainen siima
oli meidän vintillä kun oli paljon koiranpentuja
ja yks näistä pennuista sai sen siiman huuleensa.

The Shaving

The meadows used to be really wonderful,
with all daisies there, that I remember,
and there was this sort of clearing at one time
but what was that plant
the one the butterflies went for
what plant was that and
then the forest was chopped down and it was gone
but I just can’t dredge up the name
I might have it
we walked over a bridge from it
and the bridge crossed a river to a bird cherry and
the bird cherry bent over the river and ferns
and smelly cranesbill and a flat stone on the path
and I’ve had so many dreams about that path,
one had loads of ants
another had no ants
the first had lots of pine needles and cones but the other,
it was gentle, like, it had a daisy meadow
next to it and there was this cabin in the wilderness
Dad went out every Sunday morning to shoot birds
and we had earthworms at home and
we were always collecting them ‘cause we had a long fishing line,
the sort with lots of hooks
and once we had a line like that
in the attic when we had lots of puppies
and one of the puppies got its lip caught in the line.by Henriikka Tavi

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Two announcements: The Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Details of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival have been released! Taking place between 12-14 September 2014, the festival is three days in length, features thirty poets, and hosts twenty-six events, including internationally-acclaimed and award-winning writers such as Patience Agbabi [Creative Writing Fellow here at Brookes], Ros Barber, David Constantine, Christopher Reid, Michael Longley, and Kate Firth. For more details, visit the Festival’s website, its Facebook page, or follow it on Twitter.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Hailing from Vehkalahti, now a part of Hamina, Henriikka Tavi’s (b.1978) first book, Esim. won the Helsingin Sanomat first book prize. She studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki and is a founding member of the co-op poetry publishing house Poesia. From 2006 until 2010 she also worked for the poetry magazine Tuli&Savu, serving as its chief editor from 2008 with Mikael Brygger.Published by Arc Publications in its New Voices from Europe and Beyond series, and edited by Teemu Manninen, Six Finnish Poets features the work of: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen. Their poems are translated by Lola Rogers, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, and Helen R. Boultrum. These poets offer a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from science fiction to punk to whimsical subject matters. Several of the poets in this anthology collaborate with other artists and this engagement is evident as the poems speak to each other across the collection.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

Francisco Goya Self-Portrait [Oil on Canvas, c.1815, Prado, Madrid]

August 11, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Terrors are eyes’ dust
of my dogs and monsters,
giants and catholics and kings;
their internecine wars
growl into my dead ears’
cloven expectations,
climb up the very walls
to hive the time again
towards existence
and the almost possible.

Thus can I show the horror vision grants
behind the tremor of our sight and skin,
draw out the dark that age has patterned.
Knuckle lead white and carbon
sour on bones’ illusions
now beyond all courts and favours
can I step back into the shadows’ mysteries
and dear God’s hopes of favours;
fight back in dark oils and stark
against the blank and surface of the world
that etches past the brain’s protective bones
as dry and marrowed out of copper
into the aqua vita black and resurrections
pressed through the arc of devils and their dams
in silence just behind the hum of pain
throbbing again from out my mother’s
body of light gave life to the bright earlier beings
of pastel pales and greens under blue clouds
that scattered into sight and silence
just behind the scream.

It will be saved
as I
without the need of sound
that vision hides behind
and drags the horrors into
the beautiful
even without the mind’s
obedience to its call.

by David Pollard

A reminder that The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.  The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

David Pollard has been furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He has published The Poetry of Keats, A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and four volumes of poetry: patricides,Risk of Skin, Self-Portraits and bedbound. Find out more about David Pollard’s work from his website, follow him on Twitter, and read more about his latest collection from the Waterloo website.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher 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 Lives of the Poet

August 4, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He remembers lunchtime readings at The Swan,
The Dove, The Mermaid; ‘the girls were all gazelles’
and among them sat that lovely, dutiful daughter . . .
He loved her. He began to write ghazals
to her eyes that reminded him of the sea . . .
He stepped out to sun that glittered on the water
beyond shop-girls and typists, suited types
and he felt, not that they were ‘free bloody birds’
but that happiness might still be caught, endlessly –
a salt-wet happiness in which there were few words,
in which she lay naked with that just-fucked look
and oleanders rustled in the breeze that shook
a leaf-shower down outside, while on
her shoulder shuttered moonlight fell in stripes . . .

Immoderation, intransigence, exorbitance,
a feeling of being out-of-this-world
or better-than-this-world, the prizes coming
at the wrong times to the proper people
and vice-versa, the protestations
of cheerfulness, the all-pervasive insecurity,
the chronic lack of commitment, the lifelong
dependence on others – for hospitality,
money, love – the simultaneous contradictory
impulses to be adored and alone, connected
and adrift; the brief passionate flare-ups, the long
epistolary retreats, the ecstatic arrivals,
panic departures; ‘agonizing reappraisal’,
disavowal; severe gloom, habitual dejection.

by Alan Jenkins

Poems ‘9’ and ‘20’ from Lives of the Poet are copyright © Alan Jenkins, 2013, and reprinted from The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann, edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard (CB editions, 2013).

Calling all poets! The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre invites all members of the Oxford community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.

The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Notes from CB editions:

Alan Jenkins, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, has published a number of poetry collections, among them Harm (Forward Prize, 1994) and A Shorter Life (2005). The second poem here, in italics, is from the prose of the poet and translator Michael Hofmann – himself the subject of the book in which the poems are included, a collection of memoirs, poems and criticism published by CBe under the title The Palm Beach Effect.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London.

Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

‘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 ‘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.

Frame for an abacus

July 14, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An early April morning,
outside that door where dad
swooped down and scooped me up,Don’t go in. Mum is sleeping.

I started counting windows.

ii.

I have grown into a good mathematician.
Today I am studying Pi, prime numbers, angles,
how the light from those windows
formed a perfect Isosceles triangle.

iii.

Calculate the degree of diffracted light
If a door is:

one, open,
two, closed,
three, start again.by Maggie Sullivan

This Wednesday July 16^th from 7-8.30pm, Blackwell’s Oxford presents: Four Poets Reading. The evening features Susie Campbell, Amira Thoron, Claire Trévien, and Jennifer Wong (one of our PhD students in poetry at Brookes). A free evening of poetry, with drinks and books for sale.

Maggie Sullivan has been a trustee of the Poetry Society, a workshop tutor for CoolTan Arts and is a mentor for Survivors’ Poetry. Her first collection, near death {domestic}, was published by Tall Lighthouse Press. ‘Frame for an abacus’ comes from her second collection, the remote, published by Waterloo Press in 2013. You can read another selection from the remote on the Waterloo website.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook.