Days full of caves and tigers

~ oxfordbrookesuni

If the branch caught among the boulders reached us
after a rough and stormy passage,
and you retrieve it
like a hunting trophy, to paint
in red and yellow,
colours of the tiger and the dragon;
if the stone’s flat surface
tells a story of grey
wolf skin
or of shipwreck on the shores
of the Lugano Sea, which they wrongly claim
to be a lake;
if really my intention was to write something else
about you that seemed so crystal clear,
but even in my mind
you manage to confuse it, and you are never
sensible and good as gold; it must mean
the world is more jazzy and exciting,
the nights long with shouting
and the days full of caves and tigers,
where great courage is needed to enter
in quest of golden bough or sparkling
gemstone, amethyst or tourmaline.

by Fabio Pusterla

‘Days full of caves and tigers’ by Fabio Pusterla, translated by Simon Knight, is copyright © Fabio Pusterla, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from Days Full of Caves and Tigers (Arc Publications, 2012).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Fabio Pusterla (b. 1957) is of mixed Swiss / Italian parentage, teaches Italian literature at the cantonal high school in Lugano, and lives just across the border on the Italian shore of Lake Lugano (Lago di Ceresio) in one of the villages of the Valsolda. A poet, translator, essayist and scholar, he contributes to many Italian, Swiss and French literary periodicals. The collection Days Full of Caves and Tigers is drawn from six books which span Pusterla’s poetic career from 1985 to 2011. You can read ‘Deposition’, another poem from the book, on Arc’s site, and get an insight into the translation process by reading an interview with Simon Knight on the Arc blog.

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.

Slippage

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A dark blue hourglass on the bookshelf fills
with evening light. I turn it over, watch
the sand slip through its waist, narrow as a wasp’s
& count the time it takes the sand to fall…

Outside, the Western Ocean cracks its whips
against the stacks of rock at Castle Point,
those hulking blocks of granite that once slipped
onto the sea, now ground to sand & quartz.

Inside, the Irish Theological
informs us there are two types of slipped disc –
‘hard’ & ‘soft’. The first hits suddenly,
the other’s slow, like the changes of our love.

Kept indoors by the rain our daughter laughs.
She points out to the bay & voices ‘blue’
& I can’t help but feel that we’re the halves
the sand of her young life now trickles through.

by Andy Brown

‘Slippage’ is copyright © Andy Brown, 2001. It is reprinted from Of Science, edited by David Morley & Andy Brown (published by Worple Press in 2001) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Of Science is a sample of poems by contemporary poets who are also trained as scientists. The writers of this selection are drawn from the fields of freshwater ecology, mathematics, marine biology, neural physiology, ethnology, computing, phenomenology and biochemistry. The mode of selection is modelled on the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, in the spirit of Miroslav Holub’s notion of ‘serious play’, with the shared belief of Wordsworth and Coleridge that ‘poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.’ Read more about the book on Worple’s site.

Andy Brown is Director of the Exeter University Writing Programme, and was formerly an Arvon Foundation Centre Director. He collaborated with David Morley on the Worple Press poetry collection Of Science. His most recent book of poems is The Fool and the Physician (Salt Publishing). Other recent books are Goose Music (with John Burnside), Fall of the Rebel Angels (both Salt) and The Storm Berm. A selection of his poems appears in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade. He edited two collections of correspondences with authors, Binary Myths 1&2, and is editing a book of essays on Kelvin Corocoran (Shearsman). He is also co-editing A Body of Work: Poetry and Medicine 1750-present with Corinna Wagner, for Bloomsbury/Continuum. Find out more about Andy Brown’s work from his blog.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

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.

Hydrotherapy

~ oxfordbrookesuni

                                                                                       as
                                                                                  gods play
                                                                             on sanctus strings

                                                                                       healing
                                                                                  fingers bring
                                                                                liquid upon you

                                                                                       spilt
                                                                                     down after
                                                                                 down cliff after

                                                                                         cliff
                                                                                   without plan
                                                                                to basin a
     
                                                                                        place
                                                                                   to rest
                                                                                to rust from

                                                                                        one
                                                                                   hour to
                                                                                 next in salts

                                                                                         silt
                                                                                      scatter of
                                                                                  light and elect

                                                                                            pain
                                                                                       is not
                                                                                 granted to us

                                                                                          prayer
                                                                                      thrives in
                                                                                 lit air O

                                                                                         holy
                                                                                     spirits you
                                                                               walk up there

by Andrew Bailey

Many apologies for the fact that this week’s Weekly Poem is late. This was due to a server problem, and we hope to have resolved it for now.

Those of you following us on Facebook, Twitter, or looking over the recent Forward Prizes shortlists, will have seen the exciting news that Brookes’ Creative Writing Fellow Patience Agbabi has been shortlisted for Best Single Poem for ‘The Doll’s House’. You can read the poem on the Poetry Society website (pdf), and find out on the Brookes website about how Patience came to write it.

The Poetry Centre and the Department of English and Modern Languages is also delighted to announce a PhD Studentship in Poetry. This is a three-year, full-time PhD studentship in any aspect of Poetry and Poetics. More details can be found here, and we would very much welcome your circulation of this news.

‘Hydrotherapy’ is copyright © Andrew Bailey, 2012, and reprinted from his book Zeal, published by Enitharmon Books in 2012.

Notes from Enitharmon:

In Zeal, Andrew Bailey honours the moments in which the everyday face of the world slips for a second. Dream, myth, faith or intoxication will lead you there; but these glimmers can intrude upon a life when they are least expected. With a poetic eye alert to these moments and roots in the work of Redgrove, Raine, Hopkins and Blake, Bailey’s writing follows an unselfconscious and fascinating path toward the more than quotidian. Penelope Shuttle called Zeal ‘[a] notable début’, observing that ‘[e]lements of earth, air, fire and water are the presiding spirits of this collection, poems that explore transactions between a strongly realised physical world and inward experience. Fluid tactile language is tempered here by stringent observation and wit.’ You can find out more about the collection on the Enitharmon site, and follow Andrew Bailey’s work on his blog and on Twitter.

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.

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 River Flowing Under The Bank of England Dreams of Power

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Our slow-green hair has grown. Samson sings
in the loosening links of his brick chain,

ancient tunes of sewage, wave, and drains.
We abrade the runs they lace us through

we swell, we pound; soon otters, willow,
dace and cress below the human landscape

shall burst into their money rooms and break
their fishbone combs, their bead-pearl cufflinks,

coins duller than carp scales, empty wells of ink.
Bonds shall be broken, mussels prise the pyx.

Fish shall dine on floating boards, and silver-fixing
conclaves shall be lunch for oyster and clam.

City pavements tremble over our premature tomb;
the sky empowers us, we fatten, wax, grow bold.

We shall reclaim vaults, gild our snails with gold,
slew filth through their halls. We shall share nothing.

by Marianne Burton

‘The River Flowing Under The Bank of England Dreams of Power’ is copyright © Marianne Burton, 2013. It is reprinted from She Inserts the Key, published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren:

Marianne Burton studied law at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor. She worked in the City specializing in advising Friendly Societies, and as a director on the board of a pharmaceutical company. She has a first class degree in Literature from the Open University and a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway where she studied with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott. In 2010 she was tutored at Ty Newydd by Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy who encouraged her to put together her first collection. Her poems have been widely published in top literary journals including Poetry Wales, Poetry London, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her pamphlet, The Devils’ Cut, was a Poetry Book Society choice in 2007. She has won and been placed in many competitions including Mslexia, TLS, Edwin Morgan, Bridport, and Cardiff. Her work has also appeared in USA outlets such as Poetry Daily, the CSM and Broadlands: Texas Poetry Review. The book from which this poem is taken, She Inserts the Key, was today shortlisted for the 2013 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, one of the Forward Prizes for Poetry.

Writing about her work, Andrew Motion has observed that ‘Marianne Burton’s poems combine grace with intelligence, toughness with delicacy, and thoughtfulness with sensuality. This means her work is full of surprising challenges and reconciliations – all of which bring rich rewards to the reader.’ You can read further selections from the book on the Seren website.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

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 British Summer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

My boredom chock-a-block
with furniture – the desk
in bits, the sofa cushions
cluttering the bed, drawers
shoved beneath the dresser
– I stare at Wimbledon
while listening to the man
restretch then clean
the carpets in two rooms.
Suds rumbling in their drum,
the smell of pine detergent
creeping up to me.

Two hours of plucky Brits,
mauve clouds, the covers on,
or grim-faced teenagers
washed up before their spots
have cleared, then I descend
like Norma Desmond,
out of touch, magnanimous;
and all the little dents
where chairs and tables stood
have disappeared, as though
the years of being here
had never happened.

by Stephen Knight

From 1-7 July, this week’s Weekly Poem publisher, CB editions, will be running a pop-up poetry shop at 201 Portobello Road in London. The Shop will be filled with books (from CBe, Eyewear, Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye, and more), photographs by Ken Garland, and other things, and an excellent selection of writers will be calling in to do brief pop-up readings through the week. You can find out more from Charles Boyle’s Sonofabook blog here.

‘A British Summer’ is copyright © Stephen Knight, 2012. It is reprinted from The Prince of Wails by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

The Prince of Wails is Stephen Knight‘s first collection of poems since Dream City Cinema (1996), which – like its predecessor, Flowering Limbs (1993) – was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was selected by Robert Potts in the Guardian as a Book of the Decade: ‘A masterpiece in miniature, packed with surprisingly enthusiastic and musical treatments of entropy, whether universal or personal, by a top craftsman with a quirky and disconcertingly loveable voice.’ Stephen Knight’s novel Mr Schnitzel (2000) won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award. Born in Swansea, Stephen Knight now lives in London. Read more selections from the collection on the CB editions website.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on 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 September 2012 with over 50 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.

Slow Rock

~ oxfordbrookesuni

slow rock
being limestone
pines
for rain
pockets springy needles
is not the sea
forgotten
but sounding its breath
in an airy maze
where woodpeckers
up the tempo
& who’s that
red-capped, furtive
(other hand gripped
to his mobile)

perspective
shrinks him

shoals of bedrock
leaping mid-city
console our short-lived
urgencies
          nothing
you can’t ride out
on these smooth backs
for a while
(the skyline livid)

by Jennie Feldman

Two announcements! This Friday 28 June 2013, Oxford is host to an exciting poetry event: ‘Irregular Folk Does Poetry’, which features the talents of a number of visiting and local poets, including Jack Underwood, Amy Blakemore, William Davies, and Charlotte Geater. The event will take place at the Perch on Binsey Lane in Oxford, and begins at 7.30pm.

And Oxford Brookes is currently displaying The Booker Prize, 1969-2008: an exhibition. Visit Oxford Brookes University’s Glass Tank exhibition space in the Abercrombie Building on Gipsy Lane between 17 June and 14 July to see this new exhibition, which is both an introduction to the fantastic material housed in the archive and a reflection upon Brookes’ role as custodian of the archive for a decade.

‘Slow Rock’ is copyright © Jennie Feldman, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from Swift (Anvil Press, 2012).

Notes from Anvil Press:

In Jennie Feldman’s second collection, Swift, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, Swift ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters – with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society’s margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem café. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. A Hawthornden Fellow, she lives in Jerusalem and Oxford. Her first collection, The Lost Notebook, was also published by Anvil, as were her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, and the bilingual anthology Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, co-edited and translated with Stephen Romer and shortlisted for the Popescu Prize 2011. You can read another selection from Swift on Anvil’s website.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

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.

Theme and Invariants

~ oxfordbrookesuni

So you see I’ve begun looking after you

looking for you

looking for you, who would not see
as relentlessly as I did
what we both meant
to end

So that you see just as long as you’re made
to listen
to this lyre’s
sedulous strain

Whose head severed in the river-current,
unlooked-at & still singing
all its way downstream to Lesbos

Not stopped looking after
you’d already begun to look twice
in every direction but ours

So I turned back too, back to
what we’d both been looking
away from, looking
for

looking after, in this
aftermath of whatever
we end up calling
what we ended

So you see
I’ve begun
relooking
so that you see

(pluck and pluck of the lyre)

So you see I’ve begun
again
(silt
under the eyelids,
silt on the singing tongue)

looking after you

by Bruce Beasley

The Poetry Centre hosted a special performance poetry event last year, and the video of the show is now available on YouTube! Watch it here, and enjoy sampling the talents of some of the finest Oxford poets.

‘Theme and Invariants’ is copyright © Bruce Beasley and BOA Editions, 2012, and reprinted from Theophobia (BOA, 2012).

Notes from BOA Editions:

Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia is the latest volume in his ongoing spiritual meditation, which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. The book is structured around a series of poems called ‘Pilgrim’s Deviations’ and it forms a deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley interrogates the theological, metaphysical, scientific, and political worlds of our time in a continually disrupted catechism, a ‘catechismus interruptus.’

Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and studied at Oberlin College (B.A., 1980), Columbia University (M.F.A., 1982), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D., 1993). He is the author of six previous collections of poems, including The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007), Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, 2005), and Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright for the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust and three Pushcart prizes, and his work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife the poet and nonfiction writer Suzanne Paola and their son Jin, and is a professor of English at Western Washington University. His latest collection Theophobia (BOA, 2012) is now available at BOA’s site here, where you can also read another poem from the collection, ‘From “Having Read the Holy Spirit’s Wikipedia”‘. You can also find out more about Bruce Beasley’s work from his website.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and like BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

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.

Orpheus, Just Checking

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I shouldn’t look back. I seem to come
perpetually out of the underworld,
and by feeling my way in the near
total darkness I have won back my
easily frightened away frequently dead
Muse, who follows me silently.
I’m never sure she’s there. The pupils
of my eyes dilated to catch
every glimmer of light, I inch my way
up the winding path, if it’s a path at all,
but upwards anyway to the world of life.
It’s as if I’m always at the same point
though always moving. How far have I come?
I look back. Where I had walked
alone, uncertainly, I see her,
silent still and other and dignified,
filling my eyes with light. But she stops.
I face forwards again, blinded, nonplussed.
Behind me she melts back to the dark halls.

by John Freeman

A reminder that the inaugural Reading Poetry Festival runs this week from 5-9 June. The impressive line-up of speakers includes Iain Sinclair, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Kei Miller, Zoe Skoulding, Peter Robinson, and Steven Matthews. There are also two exhibitions curated by Peter Robinson and Natalie Pollard. Many events are free but require you to book. Click here for the full programme and details about how you can book tickets.

‘Orpheus, Just Checking’ is copyright © John Freeman, 2007. It is reprinted from A Suite for Summer by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in South London and studied English at Cambridge. He lived in Yorkshire before moving to Wales where he teaches at Cardiff University. A Suite For Summer is John Freeman’s ninth collection of poems. Other collections include The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride), and Landscape With Portraits (Redbeck). Stride also published a book of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets. The essay ‘We Must Talk Now’ appeared in Cusp: recollections of poetry in transition, edited by Geraldine Monk (Shearsman, 2012). In 2013 John Freeman won third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Of his work, Jim Burns has written: ‘The movement of John Freeman’s poems is always easy to follow. The ease and the warmth make for an attractiveness that is central to the poems. And because they never lapse into the merely anecdotal they retain their quality and stand repeated reading. There is a consistency in the writing that is impressive. The voice in the poems is constant and true.’ You can read more about the collection at Worple’s site here.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint.  More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

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.

It Won’t Be Anytime Soon

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I need a man with enough sagacity
To wear a coonskin cap
And escort me and my party
Through the Cumberland Gap
A man sufficiently rough hewn
Not to see shooting a racoon
As serious crime
You need a man with enough powder and ball
To see that what lies behind a waterfall’s
The American sublime
Though you may one day track down your Daniel Boone
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with just enough gravity
To see how a dripping tap
Will bend the back of a levee
Until you hear it snap
A man sufficiently immune
To the broad strokes of the Times-Picayune
As might turn on a dime
You need a man with enough native wit to call
It like it is from the flood wall
Even as the waters climb
Though he may rise one day with the harvest moon
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with enough lucidity
To read a contour map
Of Zion or Monument Valley
Without the appropriate app
A man sufficiently attuned
To looking beyond buttes and dunes
Of sandstone and shale and lime
You need a man with enough old-fashioned gall
To tell you you look small
In geological time
Though that may one day strike you as opportune
It won’t be anytime soon

by Paul Muldoon

Poetry news! The inaugural Reading Poetry Festival runs from 5-9 June and promises to be a fantastic event. Speakers include Iain Sinclair, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Kei Miller, Zoe Skoulding, Peter Robinson, and Steven Matthews. There are also two exhibitions curated by Peter Robinson and Natalie Pollard. Many events are free but require you to book. Click here for the full programme and details about how you can book tickets.

‘It Won’t Be Anytime Soon’ is copyright © Paul Muldoon, 2012, and reprinted from his book Songs and Sonnets, published by Enitharmon Books in 2012.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the USA, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Apart from Songs and Sonnets, Muldoon’s most recent collections of poetry are Plan B (also published by Enitharmon in 2009), Maggot (2010), and The Word on the Street (2013). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was elected a Member of the American Academy in Arts and Letters in 2008. Among his awards are the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Shakespeare Prize.

Writing in The Guardian about Songs and Sonnets, Maria Johnston commented that ‘perhaps th[e] hyphenated category “poem-songs” best describes these songs and sonnets. They are complex, charged performances that vibrate in the interim between one thing and the other. They’ll rock your world.’ You can read more about Songs and Sonnets on Enitharmon’s site here, and more about Muldoon from his own website here.

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 here 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.

The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs

~ oxfordbrookesuni

When we gather we greet each other
by lifting tentatively one hand to one eye.
We meet in darkened rooms, quietly;
share no wine. Nobody speaks
but often our voices join to moan
the migraineurs psalm, low and holy.

The hours before fizz brilliantly, scented
with burnt toast and oranges, petrol, sparking
fireworks, fireflies, stars. Everyone
dons a halo, everyone’s soul
shines out through their pores, whether unnaturally
small or wrapped in a skin of water.

We sleep the night together, slip off
one by one on waking from
a dream we pass between us, in which
the structure of the sky is revealed. We make
no dates, but palm to temple, salute
in a migraineur’s kiss, our transcendence.

by Polly Atkin

There are two events to draw your attention to this week. This week’s poet, Polly Atkin, is one of a number of scholars contributing to Shifting Territories, a conference on modern and contemporary poetics of place, which is taking place on Wednesday and Thursday this week at theInstitute of English Studies in London. As well as panels of papers responding to poetry and place, the conference features readings by Jo Shapcott and David Morley, a keynote paper by Eóin Flannery, a workshop by Steven Matthews, and an evening event in association with the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature with Alice Oswald and Hugh Haughton. Find out more about the conference here.

Tomorrow at 7pm in Headington Hill Hall, Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents ‘”The Cheerful Companion”: Poetry, Music & Performance in Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellanies.’ The event will consist of a series of short talks, readings, and music, followed by an interactive session in which participants will be able to experience an authentic eighteenth-century sewing session hosted by Nicole Pohl from Oxford Brookes. All are welcome and you can find more information about the event here.

‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ is copyright © Polly Atkin, 2013. It is reprinted from Shadow Dispatches , published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin was born in Nottingham in 1980, lived in London for a number of years before moving to Cumbria in 2006 to research poems about place. Widely published in journals, various of her poems have been placed first in the Troubadour, and Kent and Sussex Competitions, been commended in the National Sonnet, McLellan, Basil Bunting, Wigtown, and Troubadour Competitions, and shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her pamphlet bone song (Clitheroe: Aussteiger, 2008) was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award. She currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing part-time at Lancaster University. ‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ comes from Polly Atkin’s MsLexia prize-winning pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches. Writing about her work, the poet Paul Farley has commented: ‘Polly Atkin’s first short collection is shot through with wit and imaginative invention and an attractive acuity. For the approaching reader: this book is truly available.’ You can read more about Shadow Dispatches at Seren’s site here, and follow Polly Atkin on Twitter here.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

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.