David Hart on Leafe's "1,000 Views of Girl Singing":

"When I received [the Laâbi] in the post, I saw at its endpaper an advertisement for Leafe Press's 1,000 Views of "Girl Singing", edited by John Bloomberg-Rissman, which caught my imagination strongly enough for me to send a cheque for it. It was money very well spent, it's a unique book, if in uneasily small print, of many invited responses, by way of poetry or visually, to a poem by Eileen Tabios.

It has led me to speculate about early modern, say 15th-16th centuries or earlier, whether there were, along with circulation of poems by hand, also response-poems and perhaps drawings: exchanges and additions verbally and visually. The book implements a fertile present and suggests a future for such intermingled new work. A delight."

States of Independence

Leafe Press will have a stall at:

"States of Independence", Independent Press Day,
Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Road, Leicester

10.30am – 4.30pm, Saturday 20th March.

Stalls from dozens of independent publishers. Workshops, readings and book launches.

Independent presses from across the region (and some from around the country) will be on site, together with many regional writers whose work is published by large and small independent publishers. Join us for an hour or two or the whole day.

Open to all and free of charge.

Full programme on www.statesofindependence.co.uk or from info@fiveleaves.co.uk

Printed programmes and posters available from info@fiveleaves.co.uk

Ed Baker's reading list from 1972 (see comments to previous post).

A young relative of mine is in her first year of a degree at a Russell Group university; her subject is Eng Lit and German, and this term she started the English poetry module. Her seminar group was asked to bring along their favourite poem. Most of the group took a poem by Carole Anne Duffy, some took a well-known poem by one of the Romantics. In discussion, all of the group confessed to not reading poetry (except when required for study). The tutor seemed to have been expecting this, as she told them that the purpose of this module was to get them to start reading poetry. It's clear to me, that the choice of Carole Anne Duffy was made simply because she is on the A-level syllabus, and that it was less a case of her being a favourite, and more that she was the only poet they'd read. Fifty years ago, perhaps thirty years ago even, such a situation would have been inconceivable. After all, these are English undergraduates! It brought home to me the fact that poetry really is crushingly unpopular, at least amongst the young. But why? Is it because we're now a visual culture, rather than oral or literary one? But people read novels, and memorize song lyrics - a form of poetry after all. Is it - as I tend to think - because what people are interested in is determined by marketing, and poetry isn't marketed, partly because it's doesn't lend itself to being marketed. TV adverts have introduced James Brown and Marvin Gaye to whole new generation, but you couldn't so easily use a poem to sell a product; what the poem is saying is too likely to conflict with the advertiser's message.

Re-reading the above, I'm not sure it's quite right to say poetry is 'unpopular'; it's more that it doesn't grab people's attention, it's not on their radar; which might support the idea that it's about marketing.

Last time I was in Stockholm it was blue skies and warm weather; this time I'm trudging through snow. They told me the sea was frozen, but when I went down to look tonight, it wasn't - apart from a narrow inlet near the Royal Palace. I'm back in the warmth now writing this, before I settle down to read Marina Warner's book on fairy tales - 'From the Beast to the Blonde' which saw me nicely through the six-hour journey to get here.

Anyone within striking distance of Leicester might want to know that there's a reading by none other than:

Tom Raworth
John James
Simon Perril

On March 4th. Details here. Thanks to Sam Ward for alerting me about this. Sadly, I won't be able to make it - I'll either be working away or at my daughter's Parent Evening.

New on Litter: a review by Clive Allen of 'Planisphere', John Ashbery's latest book

Clive said to me the other day that he'd spotted an interview quote by Ashbery:

‘I always try not to have obscure references in my poems, yet I do it all the time. It upsets me, but I go on doing it.’

As I said to Clive, I find what Ashbery says quite encouraging. In a sense, it justifies difficult poetry, because, if it's not a willed decision to be 'difficult', then it's something that comes from the subconscious, which means that difficult poetry is a genuine expression of at least one aspect of being human.

I also pointed out that Martin Amis says something similar in a recent interview in The Guardian.

Jess Mynes' book, "Sky Brightly Picked" from Nottingham's Skysill Press, is a series of short poems, each one related to a specific painting by Mark Rothko, and sharing the painting's title. Mynes doesn't attempt to write about the paintings, but rather to emulate their effect in language; so, we have abstraction combined with an attention to the materials from which the work was made, in short, crafted poems:

Untitled, 1960

caked in interstices

blush cukes
plump rasp bevel

wizen spleen distance

Words are given a materiality by being isolated as units of sound, giving the reader a sense of them as the bricks from which the poems are built. The whole project is very American, driven by, as Clark Coolidge says on the cover, "the urge to form the irreducible poem"; something that has driven poets from Carlos Williams to George Oppen to Robert Creeley. Mynes' work in this book also reminded me of John Taggart in a book like Pastorelles; though Mynes' work is more abstract. Maybe 'abstract' is the wrong word; they dispense with comment, and concentrate on the response to the artwork. They are precise meditations, echoing the spiritual aspect of Rothko's art:

No. 10, 1952

fresco light anapest

antiseptic green quotation

equations think much
to music

a vein
a shovel
a mare foaled

I was bowled over by this book. It's a real achievement to have produced 94 poems in this style without any seeming lapse in quality; you can open the book at random and always find something fresh and engaging. I might also mention the superb photgraph and cover design by Sam Ward.

Don Paterson (OBE) has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was recommended by Carol Anne Duffy (CBE), the British Royal Court's Poet Laureate. The Scottish bard was chosen for the medal by a committee of "eminent men and women of letters", selected by Ms. Duffy.

Says Duffy: "It’s simply about excellence, and it means that the monarchy can sprinkle a little stardust on poetry.”

Yes, she really said that.

Unabashed, she continued to heap praise on the medallist's poetry: “It’s formally very accomplished, and technically brilliant" (i.e. it's uses conventional rhyme and metre). Duffy then ploughed on, embarassingly, about how Paterson taps into "deep, timeless human experiences" and ended with a resounding cliche, cleverly combined with a bit of canonisation: "He’s a poet for all time who speaks very much to us in the 21st century, to our preoccupations, but he also belongs in the company of the poets of the past.”

It's appropriate that the award was instituted by King George V: Paterson's poetry reads to me like minor Georgian poetry. But that's the way with literary awards; the example of Abdellatif Laabi below shows that they sometimes, almost by chance, get the right person. But not often. Ah, well. 'Twas ever thus.

I spent this morning in IKEA choosing furniture (or having it chosen) for my teenage daughter's bedroom. I spent this afternoon putting up a curtain rail in the same bedroom (yes, it took that long). I'll probably spend tomorrow assembling aformentioned flat-pack furniture. This is no life for a poet!

I remember reading that when WS Graham moved house in Cornwall, he left in only the clothes he stood up in and walked to the the new house. Sounds like a dream of freedom and simplicity. I hate to say it, but I'm more like Philip Larkin who wondered what he might have achieved if he hadn't written his poetry at the end of long working days.