April Eye
News
RECENT PUBLICATIONS (2008)
Best at Night Alone. Oystercatcher Press. Set of 48 short pieces as a 20pp A5 booklet with a cover by Peter Hughes.
Interview with Todd Thorpe. Jacket no.35 (website) edited by John Tranter. This was a verbatim interview but subsequently tailored, polished and curtailed by e-mail discussion, and with clarifying / defining sections (“monologues”) added at the ends of the three sections, which are headed ‘Lyric’, ‘Pastoral / Place (Alstonefield)’, and ‘Poetic Line / Poetic Scale’. The ‘Pastoral’ one is much the most substantial as that is the topic of Todd’s research in British poetry. It’s one of my “getting myself into trouble again” pieces.
Review of Peter Hughes, Nistanimera. PN Review 180
Seán Rafferty’s Echoes (essay). Intercapillary Space (blogspot). 23rd June 2008, as part of a small symposium on Seán Rafferty. Rafferty was a great character, but also a poet who wrote little, and rather hesitantly I think, until he reached the age of 82 and then he really got going, and died a few years later. He looked after the chickens at Ted Hughes’ place in North Devon.
Airs at Furthest Accord (poem) Axolotl
no.1, Cambridge
Axolotl is a new A4 stapled thing edited by Luke Roberts, one of the
very worthy bunch of post-graduate students/poetry aficionados
we’ve had here of recent years. This issue includes Nick
Potamitis, Manson/Mallarmé, Ian Patterson, Sean Bonney etc.
and several long poems by Cambridge debutants in more or less the kinds
of dialect you’d expect from here, individually and
competently turned, especially, I thought, one Louis Jagger. Axolotl is
given away free -- contact lwr21[at]cam[d0t]ac[d0t]uk
Andrew Crozier: an appreciation. PN Review no.182.
Andrew Crozier (obituary). The Guardian 21st July 2008
‘Greek Passages’. Fulcrum (annual) no.6. USA 2008.
A special construct of 21 poems from Greek Passages concerning the story of Helen of Troy, with introduction. Title changed by the editors from “from Greek Passages”. Instruction from the author to list it under “poetry” rather than “essays” on the contents page, ignored. Badly set with no device or spacing to mark the end of the introduction and beginning of the poems. Fulcrum is a massively managerial and prestigious poetry institution with five editors, 22 contributing editors from all over the northern world, 20-strong board of directors, managing editor, art director, director of marketing and development, advisors, assistants and ‘public co-ordinators’ whatever they do, benefactors and lots of rules and regulations. It is like a model of a typical American corporation, and like them its duties are probably primarily towards itself. The issue was delayed over six months in order to secure publication of Beckett poems in a special feature “Samuel Beckett as Poet” (Whatever Beckett was he was never a poet) and three unpublished talks by Robert Frost which are not worth reading. There is a folio of realist monochrome street photographs. Of course there is. Billy Collins says it is a must-read, but reading doesn’t seem to me to be what it is mainly designed for. It is said that Jack Spicer died because of the weight of this kind of thing on his soul. It weighs exactly one kilo.
Anyway “Greek Passages” is part of an interesting and diversified feature called “Poetry and Myth” edited by Cliff Forshaw and David Kennedy. It contains most of the interesting writing in the whole kilo.
Twelve Cuban Instants (set of short poems) PN Review no. 183
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
They came from the east... (prose). The Canting Academy, edited by David Annwn, to be published by IsPress.
Bits and Pieces picked up in April 2007, or, Six Days in Tuscany with Roger Langley (set of nine short poems). Tenth Muse no.16.
Review of John Welch: Collected Poems, and Dreaming Arrival. The Use of English.
Thomas and Apocalypse (essay on Dylan Thomas and the ‘New
Apocalypse’ poets) . Poetry Wales. Essay
formerly on this website, to be returned to it a later date.
PROJECTS
The prose text U.S. Western (on this website), which has 59 paragraphs, has been glossed as a set of 59 very short verses, mostly couplets, called Western States. Publication in U.S.A. as a booklet is planned.
Kings Cross to S.O.A.S. An account of a walk across London which gets involved with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Thoughts on Barry MacSweeney. an essay. Waiting to hear about publication.
GREEK PASSAGES. Scheduled for publication in 2009 by Shearsman Books.
Unfinished or unstarted essays:
1. City Walking: Vienna. A journal of being stranded in Vienna for two weeks in the early winter of 2001
2. Paris Off-season. A topographical memoir with thoughts on Douglas Oliver.
3. Murder at the Tate. On the presentation of Sickert and the Camden Town painters at a London exhibition.
4. The Secret History of the Cambridge School of Poetry.
READINGS
November 14th. Dulwich College (private function)
19th November. The Lamb, Lambs Conduit Street, Bloomsbury, London. In the “Blue Bus” series, with Johan de Wit.
4th December. Drama Studio, English Faculty Building, Cambridge. An “Oystercatcher Press” reading with Peter Hughes and David Rushmer [to be confirmed]