The Man in Black

This new volume of poetry from David Caddy, editor of the excellent 'Tears in the Fence' dropped on my doormat last week,and very welcome it was too. In his review of Kelvin Corcoran, Kris Hemesley sees that poet as working on a project to define Englishness. Caddy could be seen as engaged in a similar project, and within the same radical and dissenting tradition; his journal "So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England", is fascinating contribution to that project. Poet of rural South-West England with echoes of Bunting and the MacSweeney of 'Ranter', Caddy enlists to the cause, among others, Coleridge, Johnny Cash and Lady Jane Davy. There's a search for a sense of identity:

Look, we lost ourselves and choices

some time ago, when the land

was untied, overfed, resold

and the local animals were driven away.

Caddy looks to the people forgotten by globalised urban society, like the Quakers who found common cause with poachers and the rural poor, or people who 'have the thumb, can work the hopper, mesher/...have steel to fill these tenant boots'. In some ways, this poetry reminds me of Geoffrey Hill, though Caddy has more sympathy with ordinary people, and the language seems influenced by Basil Bunting in places:

Wide Scatter of bull, clenched

rewinced, disputes the human frame

The book is nicely produced by Penned in the Margins (saddle stitched and good quality paper). I've been reading a lot of New York and Californian poetry recently, and this book is a reminder of a home-grown tradition, both of poetry and of radical politics.

Details: Paperback: 48 pages, (Penned in the Margins, 1 Nov 2007). ISBN-10: 095538463X ISBN-13: 978-0955384639. Price: 8.99

We know the festive season is upon us when we see Rupert Loydell's 'Best of the Year' lists on Stride. This year I'm pleased that he's selected a Leafe book, 'No Sounds of My Own Making' by John Bloomberg-Rissman. Thanks Rupert, if you're reading this. It's a typically eclectic list. I cetainly agree with his choice of Rae Armantrout's 'Next Life', definitely on my list (if I had one) for the best books of the year. And Rachel Blau DuPlessis is on my to-do list, having been highly recommended to me by the aformentioned John B-R.

There's a fascinating review of Kelvin Corcoran's pamphlet "Roger Hilton's Sugar" on Kris Hemensley's blog.

Since my job has become a little more demanding (moan, moan...) it occurs to me that it might be easier to write a sort of anti-blog of things I haven't done. Here are a few:

• Update Litter. Forthcoming: poems by Pete Huchel (tr. Catherine Hales), a review of Peter Gizzi by CJ Allen, and some poems by the latter.
• Join Facebook. In fact, I did join, at the invitation of Carrie Etter and Tony Frazer. It looks great: a cornucopia of things to do, and people to talk to. But I could imagine spending a lot of precious hours on it, and right now... so I've suspended my membership for now.
• Meet up with Clive Allen, Adrian Buckner and Martin Stannard for one of our regular get-togethers, which occured on Saturday afternoon in town. Sorry guys. Next time, I hope...
• Answer emails, including one from Kris Hemmensley, back in Oz now, and with Leafe Press pamphlets on his bookshop shelves. Sorry Kris, will get back to you.

The Leafe Press website, including Litter has gone down. Apologies. My ISP is having problems with its servers, and all the websites hosted by them are out of action. The problem occured Friday evening. The ISP's own site (www.123-reg.co.uk) is also down, which is worrying. I'm hoping everything will be back to normal soon.

My employer, a German IT company, has just bought another company, and without going into the boring details, my working life is likely to get a lot more demanding than hitherto. I'm likely to be travelling around the UK and Europe and being generally an even more supine servant of global capital than I was before. I'm not complaining - other people in our work-obsessed culture have it worse - but it means it'll be harder to keep the blog up to date, not to mention maintaining my Litter and Leafe Press activities. Needs must, wolf-from-the-door etc. But I'll try my best. It's a common experience among one-man poetry outfits, witness Peter Philpott's difficulties at GreatWorks. As Peter says 'The job gets in the way of Great Works, but it's nice to be able to afford a house to work in, food etc.'

When I met John Bloomberg-Rissman in London early last year, he gave me the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, for which I've ever since been very grateful. I'd heard about Berrigan's translation of Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau Ivre' and thought I'd love to see it, and now, a poet/musician from Southern California has sent me a copy. It's a pirated copy. The poet-musician (and publisher) in question, who shall remain nameless, thought such a fine work ought to be in print, so he reproduced it in a limited edition from the original 1974 'Adventures in Poetry' chapbook. This one's complete with original cover design by Joe Brainard. The translation itself is wonderful - I recognised some of the lines from Berrigan's 'Sonnets' - and manages to sound like an American poem, rather than a French poem translated into English. I think most of all it works on a musical level, with some great lines:

...the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea

and

I've dreamed green darkness and dazzling white,
Slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea.

It would be nice to see this and other of Berrigan's translations back in print. In the meantime I feel privileged to have a copy of this poem. I'm sure Berrigan and Brainard would approve of the spirit in which this little edition has been made.

The reading at the Broadway Cinema was a success. Somehow, the word got round, and enough people turned up to fill all the seats. The room was long and narrow, with a wide window overlooking the street, and the cinema has a couple of bars and, being an 'alternative' place, has a nice bohemian-type atmosphere. Clive and Martin both read well, with an emphasis on the upbeat and entertaining side of their work. I had a feeling that some of the audience weren't poetry afficionados, and it was nice to see them enthusiastically applauding, sometimes after individual poems - the equivalent of clapping between movements at a classical concert, and a good idea if you ask me. Books were sold, which pleased me, and a good time was had by all.

Last minute panic. I called the Broadway Cinema to check on some details only to find they had no record of any booking. It's all sorted out now, but it reminded me that it's a warped Protestant Work Ethic that keeps me doing all this stuff. At least that's how I feel right now. I'm sure I'll feel different when the heaving crowds have finally dispersed and we're all high on the the post-gig euphoria...

"I noticed no representative of the Shun A’Biro Corporate Creative Writing bloc. But their Art-as-an-enticement-to-business ethos, re-forming history to pose in a suit against bad architecture, wouldn’t even notice the loss of a man who did more for the arts and culture of the North-East in two decades than they have clean shirts and mentors: and it must be hard to move with a Northern Rock tied around your ankles."

Tom Raworth, reporting on Bill Griffiths' funeral