kens-blog

30 years on

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:05:36 +0100

To Royal Holloway University of London yesterday to talk to third year creative writing students about small press publishing. Feared I would dry up with nothing more to say and long minutes to go. But in fact, an hour was not enough time to pack in everything, and I had to skip bits.

It's hard to remember that I have been a writer and publisher for over 30 years now (and Reality Street, in particular, is now in its 20th year). A shock to remember too that the students would never have seen a duplicator (mimeograph machine) and it would have been news to them that you had to type every word of what you wished to print on a special stencil (no copying and pasting then), wrap the typed stencil around the drum of the machine, having filled the drum with ink, and crank out each A4 copy by hand, then carefully peel the used stencil off the drum and hang it up to dry (with luck, it might be reusable), and repeat the process for page 2 of your document. And so on.

It was truly a material world then. Not virtual. Ink on your fingers. The smell of nail varnish, as Robert Hampson reminded me, no, not for that but to correct mistakes on the typed stencils (no backspace-delete) in an often vain attempt to avoid having to trash the whole thing and start again.

I also tried to convince the students that in many respects they have it easier now if they want to disseminate their writing. It's a big loss that you can no longer (in the UK) go into a bookshop and expect it to stock your wares. But print-on-demand, photocopying, CD and DVD duplication, the internet (email, search engines, blogs, Facebook, Youtube and all the rest) ... this would have been science fiction back in the day. The opportunities for creating communities of readers and writers outside of mass culture - which was my main message - are amazing.

Talking to them afterwards, however, I got the strong impression they valued face-to-face interaction, and real, material books rather than e-books. That's good.

Some time, I need to get back to exploring here what the poetry of those days meant to me. When I have more time.

The Moors launch (part 2)

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:14:44 +0100

It's taken me a week to recover from the launch of The Moors' album, called, imaginatively enough (as John Peel would have said) The Moors.

Two really uplifting gigs: first, last Friday, opening the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green festival in the cavernous St Mary in the Castle. I don't know how many were there, maybe 200 (?) - anyway, it was a joyous occasion, all ages from kiddies to seniors, many of them bopping and a few of them buying the CD. Roland, who had engineered our album, mixed the sound on the night. Here's a photo of us onstage (thanks, Julia). Left to right: Jenny, Elaine, Tom, me, Richard.

Then, two nights later, we played the Brunswick in Hove, as part of the Brighton Fringe festival. Unknown territory for the band. The prognosis was good, as there had been brisk pre-selling of tickets through the Fringe box office in the weeks beforehand, and indeed we sold out the 90-capacity venue on the night. Good sound, a few cuts above the average pub gig, and though it was swelteringly hot we soon relaxed and played maybe the best we ever have.

Undoubtedly, Brighton promises a big potential audience for the band, but I don't yet know when we'll be back there. If anyone knows of other venues in the city that might be happy to promote an in-your-face Balkan/klezmer.folk-rock fusion band, please let me know.

Meantime, you can still listen to our album right here, and maybe buy it....

The Moors launch

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:31:46 +0100

The Moors - the band I co-founded with Elaine - releases its first album today. You can listen to all 12 tracks online and buy the CD or download here. And there's more info here. And here.

We're launching it at St Mary in the Castle, Hastings, where the band plays the opening concert of the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green weekend this Friday 4 May, and in the Brighton Fringe Festival at the Brunswick pub on Sunday 6 May. It's going to be an exhausting weekend, but I'm looking forward to it.

Other

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:15:24 +0100

"Other" - that's been the box to tick for me since the start of my, er, writing career all those years ago. For example, I was in this, happily still available 13 years later (kudos to Peter Quartermain and the late and greatly lamented Ric Caddel for putting together that wonderful project).

And now, The Other Room, whose third birthday I was delighted to attend last year as a guest reader. This ongoing venture in Manchester owes everything to the efforts and imagination of James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston, helped by several others.

If you can't get to their events you can always buy the fourth annual edition of The Other Room Anthology, which is out now, crammed with contributions by people who have read there over the past year: Tim Allen, David Berridge, Andrea Brady, Rachel Lois Clapham & Stephen Perry, Jennifer Cooke, and, well, many other brilliant poets and writers further down the alphabet. It costs £6.75 inc postage if you live in the UK, and £8 if you live anywhere else. There is huge variety here. Don't miss.

New Reality Street books

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:41:52 +0100

Paul Brown's A Cabin in the Mountains and Maggie O'Sullivan's Waterfalls are due to be published on 1 May - but as the books already seem to be available on Amazon and elsewhere (nobody seems to care about publication embargos any more) I might as well put them up on sale on the RS website. So they are.

Reality Street Supporters will be receiving their copies in the next few days - well, some will already have them, and the rest should arrive by the end of next week.

It's a cliché to say a book has been a long time coming, but in the case of Paul's book this is inescapably true. It's about 20 years late. Paul was prominent in the London poetry scene during the 1970s/80s as a poet, publisher (Transgravity Press, Actual Size, publishing Tom Raworth among many others), poetry translator (from Dutch/Flemish) and reading series organiser (I joined him on several ventures). He also taught a poetry class at Goldsmith's College. A Cabin in the Mountains is the missing third of a trilogy of books, the first two being published in 1978 and 1982. I had the manuscript for a long time. Paul left the poetry scene and has been a bookseller in Brighton since 1995.

Well, here it is at last. If you know Paul Brown's work from back in the day you will want this book to complete your collection. If you don't know it, please do check it out. Unjustly neglected. There's another true cliché.

Maggie O'Sullivan probably needs no introduction to Reality Street aficionados, as this will be her third collection for the press, adding to her editing of our landmark anthology Out of Everywhere. Though actually, again, it's not a new work. Dating from the 1990s, Waterfalls was originally published as a very limited edition by Etruscan Books three years ago and sold out quickly. The RS edition lacks the colour graphics, though they reproduce very nicely in greyscale, but in other respects the texts are identical.

(If you are a Reality Street Supporter and already have the original edition, and would prefer a substitute from the back catalogue, please let me know.)

Christine Brooke-Rose

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:35:59 +0100

When I started the Reality Street Narrative Series, I devised some copy for the page of this website devoted to it - which you can find here - trying to give it some context. This included my necessarily highly selective listing of writers of out-there fiction whose influence I perceived to be crucial.

Well, selective or not, it was an unforgivable lapse on my part to forget to include Christine Brooke-Rose, who has recently died. Gifted writers outside the mainstream in Britain face enough marginalisation without the likes of myself, inadvertently or not, adding to the general level of ignorance.

I have now belatedly remedied that lapse on the Narrative Series page, but it shouldn't have taken the sad death of this author - whose novel Between omitted the verb "to be" a year before the Oulipian Perec's famous e-less La Disparition, as the Guardian obit reminds us - to jog my memory.

The excellent Carcanet Press have several of Brooke-Rose's books in print - Between is included in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus. I must catch up with all the ones I've missed.

Denise Riley first in a decade

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:31:16 +0100

Denise Riley has published her first poetry since Reality Street's Selected Poems more than a decade ago. "A Part Song" is an elegy or lamentation in different modes, following the death of her son in 2008, and appears in the London Review of Books (9 February).

Denise has also written an essay associated with this, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, published as a chapbook by Capsule Editions.

Fellow Reality Street author Peter Riley (no relation) reviews both at The Fortnightly Review. (He interprets "A Part Song" as "a set of 20 short poems".)

Burnt gorse

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:43:07 +0100

A large area of gorse and heather caught fire on the East Hill, overlooking Hastings Old Town, yesterday evening (21 March). BBC Sussex reports that firefighters managed to put out the conflagration, though not before some houses below on Tackleway and All Saints Street were evacuated as a precaution. My picture was taken this morning - you can see that there is still some smouldering.

(PS: And in the background you can glimpse the remains of another, more serious fire: Hastings Pier, this week the subject of a compulsory purchase order by Hastings Borough Council after its owners failed to respond to all attempts to contact them.)

Jerwood opening in Hastings

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:09:47 +0100

After years of eager anticipation and sometimes bitter wrangling, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings Old Town opens this weekend (17 March). The gallery has been developed by the Jerwood Foundation to house its collection of British 20th century and contemporary art, and is part of a regeneration project which includes the creation of new open space and community facilities by the local council.

I last wrote about this almost exactly two years ago, when antipathy among some locals including a proportion (but by no means all) of the local fishing community was at its height. While some concerns about the impact of the new gallery may have been legitimate, the bitterness was often fuelled by misinformation and just plain ignorance. The gallery has not and was never to have been built on "The Stade" - the name for the centuries-old fishing beach, fiercely defended by generations of deep-sea fishermen - but on part of a former coach and lorry park which frankly was a bit of an eyesore. Coaches still deliver visitors to the Old Town but have to park elsewhere. The rest of the former parking lot has now become public open space where events such as concerts and markets will take place. The gallery displays an important collection of modern British art for the first time and will be host to community and educational projects - ie it's not "just another gallery", but a significant addition to the growing list of major art attractions springing up along the Kent and Sussex coast, such as the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.

The architects, HAT, have clearly been mindful of the controversy and come up with an elegant but very low-key building designed to blend in with Hastings' iconic "net shops" - the tall black structures dating from the 19th century still in use to store and dry fishing nets, seen in the foreground of the picture above. In my view, they have rather bent over backwards to appease hostile opinion and avoid giving offence. The lines of the building are bland, but the cladding, described elsewhere as of "pewter-black tiles" is attractive and at any rate in keeping with the immediate environment.

I had a chance to preview the building this week before it opened to the public, courtesy of the local residents' association. The interior is surprisingly spacious and restful, and a beautiful setting for the core collection, or that portion of it that was on view. The architects have incorporated into the various internal spaces occasional picture windows affording startling views of the Old Town, the new open space and out towards the fishing beach. We weren't allowed to take photos of the interior, but I couldn't resist a shot of the beach, shrouded in a sea-mist that suddenly swirled up that afternoon, with a fading anti-Jerwood slogan on a white van parked directly behind the building.

Let's hope the anger has died down (I certainly knew about it - I was on the receiving end of threatening behaviour by one individual a couple of years ago for displaying a pro-Jerwood poster), and the gallery will be accepted as part of the landscape and prove to be an asset to the local economy as well as the local culture.

What about the art? The initial temporary exhibition of huge, quirky canvases by Rose Wylie, a Kent-based painter getting late recognition in her 70s, is worth a visit. This lasts until July, when it will be replaced by a show of paintings and sculptures by Gary Hume. The permanent collection includes works by Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Patrick Caulfield and others less well known. I am frustrated by the lack of information on the Jerwood Gallery website, which refers vaguely to a collection of "around two hundred British oil painting and works on paper" (of which surely less than half are on display) but does not document this any further. Perhaps this is something that will be improved over the coming months and years.

Small press firebombed

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:27:16 +0100

Shocking news has reached us that the office of Vancouver's New Star Books was hit by an arson attack in the early morning of 7 March.

Thankfully, no-one was hurt, but water damage has ruined much of New Star's stock, including all copies of the fifth printing of Lisa Robertson's Debbie: an epic.

Reality Street was the UK co-publisher of Debbie (of which a few copies remain here), as well as Lisa Robertson's subsequent book The Weather. We are due to co-operate again with New Star in the next year or two to bring out David Bromige's Collected Poems on both sides of the Atlantic.

My very best wishes to Rolf Maurer and all at New Star, who are showing admirable chutzpah following this setback. And let's hope the perpetrators are brought to justice soon.