Abegail Morley's blog

I'm delighted to be the current Featured Poet over at Abegail Morley's excellent blog. She's generously showcasing two poems from Inventing Truth, 01252 722698 and Epilogue, and you can read them here.

Abegail's well known as both a top-notch poet and editor, while her blog archive provides an ideal introduction to the work of many terrific poets. I very much recommend a leisurely look through it and have added her blog to the roll on Rogue Strands so as to keep up with new posts.

Ironing

Over at her HappenStance blog, Helena Nelson is very kindly featuring my poem, La Despedida (from Inventing Truth), as part of a post on "The Ironing Poem Genre".

Now that title might seem somewhat tongue in cheek, but there is actually a fair degree of substance to it. In fact, it reminded me of a poem, Ironing, from Peter Sansom's excellent collection, The Last Place on Earth, which begins as follows:

"I like it best when there's time to see myself
through the drizzle of a weekday morning
with Woman's Hour or a talking-book detective,
and forsythia defining the universe..."

As with my own poem, Sansom is playing with the gender expectations involved with the task of ironing, although he goes about it in a very different way. His focus is on the mechanical and repetitive nature of the chore, beginning with a quote from Stanley Cook that evokes "the perfect release of a limited aim". In this sense, hia poem recalls an Ian McMillan poem, Three Boring Miles on the Exercise Bike, which starts with...

"Three boring miles. The television flickering
in the corner of my eye. A man talking..."

Both poems gradually build up detail so as to explore the significance of a regular event. McMillan and Sansom concentrate on the repetitive nature of the task, while I portray an everyday task that suddenly becomes everything but everyday - in La Despedida a routine is transformed into a pivotal moment and is even more highly charged as a result. These are very different and equally valid examples of how ordinary occurences can turn into ambitious poetry.

Dr. Seuss

I picked up a copy of Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat for my son at a car boot sale a few months ago. On reading it with him, I recalled having done so with my own father, always demanding it, treasuring it as my favourite book.

Putting aside doubts over its literary merits, sometimes clunky versification and the advances since then in children's poetry, I was struck once more by its vibrant language, by how it relishes playing with words, by how it transmits that infectious enjoyment to young readers. In other words, I'm now piecing back together part of the process that led to my falling in love with poetry. Our children so often help us to view afresh our own upbringing.

Object lessons

Poems about objects have quite rightly found themselves a bad name over recent years, due in no small part to the vast number that are churned out by and for creative writing workshops. In other words, objects are an easy tool for tutors who are driving a session from a common point of departure.

As for myself, I'm fully aware that objects have always played a key role in my poetry, but perhaps even more so than usual over the past few months. However, I don't sit down to write a poem about objects, nor do I use them as a creative resource to mine as subject matter for verse. Instead, they form a crucial part of my exploration of axis moments and their landscape. When portraying a scene, an significant element is often the importance that characters invest in certain objects, lifting them beyond their everyday meaning. This transcendence is highly charged. It may be ridiculous, grotesque, melancholy or delicious, but it invariably provides the reader with a fresh emotional perspective, all played out via the role of objects.

I don't set out to use them, but they populate my poetry and my imagination just like the characters around them. As I grow older, I grow ever more aware of how our exaggerated attitude to certain objects reveals a lot about us. They teach us lessons about ourselves every day.

Enrique Sierra

Enrique Sierra, the guitarist for Radio Futura, died last Friday from complications following a second kidney transplant.

Radio Futura are one of the best groups in the history of Spanish popular music (they are certainly my favourites). Led by the brothers Santiago and Luis Auserón, they took elements of punk and latin sounds to create a fusion that became something new and specific to Iberia, all combined with brilliant lyrics that far surpass most contemporary Spanish verse! Enrique Sierra was very much in the background, but his contribution to their blending of influences shouldn't be underestimated.

This performance of 37 grados, from the terrific La Canción de Juan Perro album, shows Sierra alongside the brothers and in his element...

Crystal Clear Creators

I met Jonathan and Maria Taylor, the driving forces behind Crystal Clear Creators, when they jointly organised (along with Nine Arches Press) the reading at which I launched Inventing Truth in Leicester last April. Their enthusiasm was clear from the start, as was the quality of their magazine, Hearing Voices. In fact, I was delighted when my first poems since my pamphlet appeared in Issue 4 a few months ago.

However, Crystal Clear Creators are now taking a further major step with their  "Crystal Pamphlets," a new series of individually-authored chapbooks, published 1 March 2012, by Roy Marshall, Charles G Lauder Jr, Aly Stoneman, Jessica Mayhew, Hannah Stevens and Andrew "Mulletproof" Graves. They look great, and you can see the covers on the Crystal Clear Creators website here. Of the six poets, I'm most familiar with Roy's work in magazines, and very much look forward to seeing how his verse shapes up in the format of a pamphlet.

The collections will be launched  on Friday 2nd March, 6-7.30pm, at De Montfort University, Leicester. I won't be able to make it there from Spain, but I wish all involved every success. This is another example of the emergence of a dynamic new paper-based poetry publisher in the U.K. - terrific news!

Paul Bentley's Largo

My review of Paul Bentley's Smith-Doorstep pamphlet, Largo, has just gone live over at Sphinx Review. You can find it here.

It was an especially difficult piece for me to write, as you'll notice when reading it. Reviewing presents numerous challenges that in turn can make me reflect on my own views and prejudices. I've always maintained that a review tells the reader as much about the reviewer as about the book in question, and I'm fully aware that I'm no exception! 

The accompanying reviews of the same book by Gill Andrews and Helena Nelson provide an excellent counterpoint to my own piece, backing me up and dismantling my arguments in equal measure.