I was pleased and flattered to get a friendly email from Kris Hemensley, who'd been reading my blog and Litter. Kris runs the famous 'Collected Works' bookshop in Melbourne, Australia. You can read some background on the man himself here, and read his fascinating blog here. He kindly ordered a batch of Leafe pamphlets.

While in Cornwall, I visited the Tate St. Ives for the first time. I wasn't disappointed by the main gallery and it's fabulous view of the coastline. There were a couple of temporary exhibitions, but the thing I enjoyed was the work by the St.Ives painters Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter. There wasn't much by Roger Hilton as I believe it's out on a touring exhibition. My teenage daughter was less impressed. She pointed out that you don't need to traipse round a gallery to see paintings, you could just buy posters or look at them in books or web pages - thus delivering a devastating critique of western Art, albeit one that's been noted before.

For the last two weeks we've been hiding out in a little, steep-sided valley on the Devon coast with no internet access and no mobile phone signal. I bought the Saturday Guardian, and settled down to read it in the sun outside our caravan in a state of prelapsarian bliss, recalling the days so long ago when I knew nothing about the byzantine complexities of the UK poetry scene.

In The Guardian, a mammoth review section looked at cinema, theatre, music, novels, biographies, histories - you name it. And poetry? Buried in the wad of pages, a single short column: Sean O'Brien reviewing a friend (Matthew Sweeney). And the review opens by considering Sweeney's place in "the English tradition". To your average person, happily ignorant of contemporary poetry, this whole situation could be misleading. As if poetry was emitted in slim volumes by a few poets striving to enter The Canon. This is how national newspapers, and the media in general, portrays poetry (when it's not being hailed as 'the new rock and roll'). Getting back from holiday, I came across a neat diagnosis of the problem on Todd Swift's blog:

"...poetry, rather than being seen as a process and a procedure, like "science", that has thousands of practitioners engaged in ongoing mutually-related work (a communal, progressive, and even Utopian model), is defined as an exclusive, minority exercise. This limits the sense of discovery and excitement actually connected to the art form that is poetry, and also minimises its daily relevance to most people... This dynamic, busy and engaged pursuit, by thousands of serious poets is not the truth about poetry that is told"

Read the whole blog entry here.

To my mind, as long as people continue to read poetry, there's no harm in as many people as possible writing it, or in the people reading it being poets themselves. That said, two weeks escape from the said communal activity to a peaceful seaside cove were very welcome.

There's an informative review of Rae Armantrout's "Next Life" at Shadowtrain, along with some good work by Robert Sheppard, Mairéad Byrne and others.

I bought a batch of pamphlets from West House Books a while ago. It's nice to know pamphlets are still appearing in this age of doorstop P-O-D books. I see the pamphlet as a form in itself, combining production, artwork and poetry. You can always rely on West House for quality, and the pamphlet that stood out for me was Christine Kennedy's 'Nineteen Nights in San Francisco', a short, witty work made up "from text found in an out of date bed and breakfast guide to California".

In the same batch I also got "Dark Wires" by Zoe Skoulding and Ian Davidson, and "It Means Nothing To Me" by Geraldine Monk and David Annwn. All recommended.

Globalisation at work: the IT staff I was training at Nissan were all Indian. The software company they work for employs 28,000 people in India, and it's not even the biggest in the country. There are also a lot of Polish workers in the plant, but I did hear one or two people speaking the local vernacular (which to some people may not sound that different to Polish). Nissan pay shop-floor workers well, so competition for jobs there is fierce, and made more so for locals by migrant workers and off-shore contractors. How long the plant can remain open in competition with Nissan factories in Russia and Czechoslovakia remains to be seen.

Current reading:

'Migrations', the long, modernist poem by Mexican poet, Gloria Gervitz. Encompassing Mexican life, Jewish identity and the immigrant experience. And of course, it's by a woman, and the central relationships in the poem are mother/daughter/grandmother - a feminine presence, sometimes a real woman, sometimes an oracle or female deity, haunts the poem. The wide-format book gives it the space it deserves, and some pages with a few lines, even a single line, give it an impressive visual impact.

Selected poems of Joanne Kyger, seminal American West Coast poet, who seems to have influenced a lot of people, from the Beats to the New Yorkers, with her Buddhist poetry of immediate experience. The notebook is the typical vehicle here for conveying moment-to-moment perception with quietness and gentle humour.

Next week I'm on a business trip to the Nissan car plant at Sunderland, and a week today we're off on a family holiday to Devon and Cornwall. Currently trying to plan a route that avoids flooded areas, taking plenty of books to read and games to play, as there seems no end in sight to the rainy weather.

No Sounds of My own Making

I'm happy to announce the publication of John Bloomberg-Rissman's new book 'No Sounds of my Own Making'. The book is available via Lightning Source's distribution channels in the UK and the USA. See the catalogue for more details.

I was re-reading this work the other night and reminded of its skillfully-handled rhythm and pace. The conception of a lyric poem as a short, self-contained unit, encompassing completion and which can be admired and dwelt on by the reader, is confounded by work like this. In a non-narrative poem of 200 pages, the reader is urged forward, and, rather than contemplate what has gone before, is presented with a turn of direction or phrase which modifies the passage just read, before being in turn affected by what comes after. Tom Raworth is a presence in these lines. It's invigorating, and not at all difficult, provided that you just go with it.

The poem is in the Hay(na)ku form invented by Eileen Tabios. Each stanza has three lines, and a total of 6 words: 1 in the first line, 2 in the second line, and 3 in the third line. It's a simple, but flexible and quick-paced form.

During the thirty days of June, the Leafe Press site had 8,181 visitors. A record. Almost twice the number of any previous month, and so far, July is shaping up to be the same. I don't know why; it's possibly because I've been linked by some big sites, including Salt Publishing. Now I know that many of these visitors will be 'spiders' and other software from search engines and so on. But that's still a healthy hit-rate.

One of my poems has just been published on Great Works. It has seven sections, so make sure you click on the 'next text' link. It's called 'Variations on Painting a Room'. Thanks to editor Peter Philpott.

Alistair Noon's review of Gael Turnbull's Collected is now up on Litter. Turnbull is a good example of how a good, perhaps great, poet, can slip through the net. He's from the same mould as Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson; indeed, regarded by both as a mentor and trailblazer, but was less well-known than either during his lifetime. In fact, his work, until recently, was unknown outside samizdat circles, despite the 'accessibility' of much of it. I'm not sure why this is - maybe he was too various a writer to fit into a marketing or academic category. Maybe he confused people by living in more than one country, or offended them by taking an interest in American and French poetry. Whatever the reasons for Turnbull's lack of visibilty, his career certainly proves that writing very good poetry is no guarantee of recognition.

Poetic Heroes, Series 1: W.S. Graham

Of all my encounters with contemporary poetry over the years, nothing has had a profounder effect on me than the poetry of WS Graham. And, like all great art, his work seems to evolve over time, changing its effects on me as I read it.

It's about fifteen years or more since I picked up his Collected Poems in a bookshop. Initially, I was attracted by his late poems - "To My Wife at Midnight" and his elegies to Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton - and then I worked my way backwards through his great poem "The Nightfishing" to his early work in the rhetorical "apocalyptic" style. Throughout his mid to late period poetry, even the most abstract and opaque, there's a human element which speaks directly to personal experience.

And of course, Graham's life, much of it spent in west Cornwall in the company of artists, was heroically dedicated to the art. As Harold Pinter put it:'W.S. Graham drank and ate poetry every day of his life'. It does seem that Graham believed, in his own words, that 'The poet or painter steers his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job'.

Right now, it's this early work that fascinates me. I've grown to appreciate it partly as I've grown to appreciate the early work of Dylan Thomas and as I've read more of contemporaries like Burns Singer. Unlike almost all practitioners of this style who later moved away from it, Graham defended his early poems, insisting that they were as good as anything that came later. Reading this early work now - always musically adept - it seems to broaden his achievement, and add a whole body of lyricism and reference to his oeuvre. I now think of the work as more consistent than I had previously reckoned. As Peter Riley persuasively argues, the later work grew directly out of the early poems and shares many of their qualities.

Take a look at the two WSG items on Litter, by Geoffrey Godbert and my good self. One of the best interpreters of Graham's work is Peter Riley, and a good place to start is his review of the New Collected Poems.

Graham produced very little prose, but I'd recommend to anyone his "Selected Letters" - an amazing, lyrical collecton of correspondence, that also includes his important early essay "Notes Towards a Poetry of Release".

As I grew up on industrial Tyneside, one of the poems that really struck a chord when I first encountered Graham was "The Dark Dialogues":

The big wind blows
Over the shore of my child
Hood in the off-season.
The small wind remurmurs
The fathering tenement
And a boy I knew running
The hide and seeking streets.
Or do these winds In their forces blow
Between the words only?