VLAK is published by the enterprising Litteraria Pragensia and this issue is edited by Louis Armand, Edmund Berrigan, Carol Watts, Stephan Delbos, David Vichnar, Jane Lewty & Ali Alizadeh. The original print edition was a handsomely designed square block of a book. The online version is complete and free to read.
I have a vested interest in that my dialogue "Nothing Doing" (from the work in progress Down With... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, December 12, 2011,
In :
writing
Those who have followed the progress of my "Bardo" project (the sixth of its seven sequences was serialised on this blog the summer before last) may be interested to know that it is now out as a book from Knives Forks & Spoons Press in a handsome edition with seven colour plates.
You can order it from their website for £8. (Also I think it's available as part of a three-for-£10 deal.)
Essentially the book is an irreverent/serious rewrite of the devotional work known in the West as the Tibeta... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, July 18, 2011,
In :
writing
The announcement of the shortlist for this year's Forward Prize for Poetry has given me the second big laugh of the week, following former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Andy Hayman's Arthur Daley impression at the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee last Tuesday.
Goodness knows I need all the laughs I can get while I'm cooped up here with my left leg in plaster. Thanks, guys.
If the hacking scandal has, temporarily at least, exposed the corruption at the very top of Britis... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, April 19, 2011,
In :
writing
I was honoured to be invited, along with Alec Finlay, Carrie Etter and a virtual Derek Henderson (broadcasting live on the internet from Utah, USA), to read on the occasion of the third birthday of The Other Room in Manchester on 6 April. It was a joy to read to an appreciative audience. Many thanks to Scott Thurston, Tom Jenks and James Davies for being amiable and efficient hosts.
The pieces I read were: "There's something in there..." "Red", "Green" and part of "Rainbow (The Sea)" from Bardo.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, April 12, 2011,
In :
writing
High-profile media-whoring is not the only activity in Hay-on-Wye in June. On the fringe of the Hay Festival is the Hay Poetry Jamboree. Run by volunteers on a shoestring budget, it's one of the most open-spirited, inquisitive and intimate of small poetry/arts festivals.
It takes place this year from 2-4 June at the Oriel Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay-on-Wye. Poets reading or talking include Ralph Hawkins, Allen Fisher, Robert Sheppard, Carol Watts, Sean Bonney, Fr... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, April 1, 2011,
In :
writing
Through my letterbox plops a package with two enticing looking books from Shearsman: Robert Sheppard's latest poetry collection Berlin Bursts, which is very welcome, and also a new collection of his essays, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. It's the cover picture that jolts me first with its familiarity.
An ever youthful Maggie O'Sullivan, all in red, holds her own with the redoubtable Bob Cobbing (1920-2002), "performing" Maggie's A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts in June 1985. (NB T... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, March 6, 2011,
In :
writing
The only obituary that I know has appeared in the national press thus far is Jeremy Noel-Tod's in The Times. In case you haven't paid Rupert Murdoch's entrance price, Jeremy has posted the obit on his blog - it has the added merit of being the unedited version. I can add nothing to this. A fine poet, sadly missed. PS No sooner had I posted the above than Peter Riley's obituary of RF Langley appeared. Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, March 3, 2011,
In :
writing
Lou Rowan says he was told the choice of name for his magazine was unwise, and perhaps the search engines will now bring a minority of ultimately disappointed visitors here too, but what the hell. It's actually a very fine journal, published from Seattle, Washington, of a kind we don't really have in the UK: featuring contemporary modernist fiction alongside adventurous poetry. (I continue to have hopes for the Cambridge Literary Review, though I feel it needs to cast its net a little more wi... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, January 26, 2011,
In :
writing
Here is the opening move from Allen Fisher's new book, Proposals: When I first came to Crewe
I saw the death of my mind
and started work again to bring it back to life through nourishment unknown to me until then with vegetables and fruit already known with tactics already tried and sometimes previously tested until on the third day after the railway declined I stood on the grime of platform 5 and revived my confidence in a lack I now recognised as necessary as demanding
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, January 19, 2011,
In :
writing
I meant to post by now a consideration of Allen Fisher's Proposals. While I am still striving to do justice to this fine book, a dozen copies of my little pamphlet millions of colours are delivered in the post. It comprises the final section of "Bardo: forty-nine prose pieces over seven days". It's a lovely little cream letterpress handmade thing bound with red thread, and you can get one from Richard Parker at Crater Press. You will need, as he says, a letter knife or similar utensil.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, January 6, 2011,
In :
writing
The "After Oulipo" edition of the online magazine Ekleksographia, published by Ahadada Books, is out. Guest edited by Philip Terry, it's a fascinating collection of current rule-based writings, inspired in various ways by the example of the original Oulipo group, members of which include Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino and Harry Mathews (who is included in this issue).
The spirit of Oulipo, which sought to free literature by, paradoxically, introducing constraints on its producti...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, November 24, 2010,
In :
writing
Busy week next. Up to Manchester a week from today to read at The Other Room. Here's the announcement:
The next Other Room is a week away, on 1st December 2010. We are back at our usual venue of The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY (on Manchester Science Park). Start time is 7 PM and admission is, as always, free. The performers are Neil Addison, Ken Edwards and Louise Woodcock. Please note that this is a change to the earlier billing for this event. There will be a well stock... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, October 20, 2010,
In :
writing
The Review of Contemporary Fiction has run a review of my Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, by A D Jameson. (You can, of course, should you wish, buy this book on this very site, I mean here.)
The magazine itself arrived this morning, and it looks like another interesting issue, "Slovak Fiction", to follow spring 2010's "Writing from Postcommunist Romania". We in the Anglophone West are so abysmally ignorant of literary developments elsewhere, so I am grateful to RCF for its continuing endeavours....
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, October 7, 2010,
In :
writing
What did happen to it? That October Thursday or whenever? A voice like a self- satisfied weasel or a caried and measled inkslinger coolly delivered its four words deep into my orifice: English poetry is dead. Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, September 13, 2010,
In :
writing
Many thanks to everyone who came to my belated birthday celebrations in Hastings on Saturday 11 September - including a few who travelled from quite far afield. The Moors were the resident band, and I think gave a great show. By the end of the action-packed weekend, I was somewhat ... well, let's say that, briefly, I did feel my age, but the feeling soon passed and I'm back to my adolescent self.
I am off to the USA soon: Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Mainly a holiday, but I look forward... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, September 4, 2010,
In :
writing
Nothing has cheered me up quite so much this week as receiving Jeff Hilson's In the Assarts from Veer Books. It's a square book, Denise Riley-style (I love this) containing 68 numbered sonnets, one to a page. No, to be exact, 68 numbered 14-line poems alluding to the sonnet tradition, except that some maybe have 13 lines and a couple are double sonnets. If I sometimes have a gripe with the otherwise inestimable Veer, it is that the type in some of their books is a little too small and ugly, b... Continue reading ...
Josipovici's remarks are focused on such multi-awarded novelists as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose work he charges as hollow. Describing their success as a "mystery", he says: "It's an ill-educated public being fed by the media – 'This is wh... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, July 26, 2010,
In :
writing
There's a piece of mine in the "Expatriations" edition of Gangway (Issue 40). It's a dialogue forming the closing section of my book of fictions in progress, Down With Beauty (it appeared previously in a different version in a different context). You have to click on "current issue".
The issue, edited by Helen Lambert, also includes writing from: José Kozer
(translated by Mark Weiss), Vahni Capildeo, Laurie Duggan,
Catherine Hales, Shelby Matthews, Kent MacCarter, Anne Elizabeth Moore,
...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, May 17, 2010,
In :
writing
I first visited Cuba in 1982, just before the Falklands War broke out. I've always been fascinated with the country - its politics, its music and (because of my bilingual background) its literature.
On that first visit, I made it one of my projects to scour Havana's bookshops for contemporary poetry. I didn't really know what I was looking for, but it certainly wasn't the Marxist-Leninist tomes and Spanish translations of Agatha Christie novels that seemed to form the bulk of the stock. In th... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, May 11, 2010,
In :
writing
I'm sorry to report that David Chaloner died on 10 May after an eighteen-month illness. Born in Cheshire in 1944, he moved to Manchester, where he became involved in poetry and jazz, his poetry being included in Michael Horovitz's seminal anthology Children of Albion. Later he founded One magazine, and in recent years had been dividing his time between London and Amsterdam. His fine Collected Poems was published in 2005. My sympathies to his family and friends.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, April 18, 2010,
In :
writing
A poet I know and like winning a major prize? And whose poetry I like too, I mean? This couldn't happen here. Many congratulations to Rae Armantrout, who has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Versed. The best reaction I've seen this side of the pond, by the way, comes from Jeremy Noel-Tod.
Writers Forum (yes, it's spelt like that, no apostrophe) is synonymous with one man: Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). From 1963 until his death it was a regular poetry workshop in London championing and encouraging experimental work, AND also a small press with a no-holds-barred approach.
In recent years, the technological phenomenon of short-run printing and print-on-demand, together with the internet's instant availability has resulted in "small" pre...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, March 23, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels
incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions
about the
place of speculation in fiction.
Let’s recap what I am trying to do here. I
wanted to consider eight books with non-naturalistic content. I chose
eight I had
never read before, because I wanted this to be an open-ended
investigation, a
kind of thinking online without preconceptions about what I was trying
to
achieve.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, March 3, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels
incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the
place of speculation in fiction.
I need to be careful discussing Christopher
Priest’s The Prestige (1995). This is one book where any detailed discussion of
the plot risks spoiling a first-time read; it’s not so much a whodunnit as a
howdunnit.
The novel concerns two 19th
century stage magicians, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, whose bitter rivalry
has tragic co...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, February 17, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an
investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view
to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Many
years ago, I used to read a lot of SF and then I got bored with it and
stopped. When I started browsing for it again on the shelves of new and
second-hand bookshops (ah! remember when it was so easy to do that?
real bookstores with real books!), there were a few names that were new
to me, one being China Miéville. Strange name. I thought...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, February 9, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is principally known these days as a writer of ghost stories. In particular, the classic “Green Tea” has been anthologised countless times.
No doubt this has coloured public perception today of his novels, but it is the case that they are not supernatural fantasies. In her 1946 introduction to the novel in question,...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, January 29, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
I’d heard of Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London, or Wild England for a while before I got round to reading it. Given that this is meant to be one of the great ur-texts of the English Catastrophe tradition – it is granddaddy, whether authors or readers are aware of it or not, to Ballard’s The Drowned World, John Wyndham’s The ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, January 20, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
This is the one that surprised me most out of the eight – and in a favourable way.
The book had lain on the shelves here unread for ten years. To be honest, I’d never had any great desire to get started on it, or on any other book by Kazuo Ishiguro. Nor had I seen the 1993 film made of his earlier Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, January 17, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
I knew a bit about Michel Houellebecq, the supposed bad boy of French letters. How he was prosecuted unsuccessfully for racism for asserting in his 2003 novel Platform that Islam was the stupidest religion. How he hated his mum and his mum hated him. That he’d written a book about H P Lovecraft. His repudiation first by French leftist writer... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, January 11, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Terrorism isn’t something that was invented on 11 September 2001, nor even thirty years before that in Northern Ireland. A hundred years ago, terrorism obsessed the Western world much as it does today. The bogeymen in those days were not Islamic extremists but revolutionary anarchists. Dynamite was the weapon of choice.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, January 5, 2010,
In :
writing
This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.
Paul Auster has been getting it in the neck from The New Yorker critic James Wood. Wood takes the opportunity of a review of Auster’s most recent novel, Invisible, to parody his oeuvre, concluding with a damning precis of what he takes to be the stereotypical Auster novel:
“A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectua... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, January 1, 2010,
In :
writing
A Happy New Decade to all regular readers and to those stumbling across this blog from wherever.
One of the projects I set myself in the year just gone was to research what exactly I mean by “speculative fiction” – a term coined in the days of New Worlds magazine in the 1960s/70s as an alternative spelling-out of the initials SF.
The idea was that the term would seek to encompass not just science fiction but any narrative that involves an element of fantasy, or to be more precise (since ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, December 9, 2009,
In :
writing
I'm recovering from last night's reading in the desperate for love series curated by Alan Hay and friends at Komedia, Brighton. I had the pleasure of supporting Tom Raworth, one of the great presences in British poetry over the past few decades. He is a formidable performer as well as poet. I also enjoyed hearing the third poet on the night, Rowena Easton.
Equally amazing to me was the audience - young, engaged, and, unusually in my experience, about 90% unknown to me. I guess there were aroun... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, October 13, 2009,
In :
writing
I thought this from the redoubtable Vahni Capildeo and cohorts was well worth a look, even if you don't get the full benefit unless you happen to travel to (or live in) Trinidad (now the chill is arriving, I wish ...).
The magazine is fragmented/distributed across townscapes for folks to encounter at random. A much better idea than the patronising, airbrushed, subsidised package that is "Poems on the Underground" in London - cf the ghastly traduction of WCW below:
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, October 9, 2009,
In :
writing
Kent Johnson, Quite Interesting US Poet/Annoying Bastard (delete according to preference), has posted a blog here under the image of a Union Flag (he says it's upside down) about what he describes as the New British School of poetry.
He talks of 'a constellation of perfectly exciting UK poets writing “in wake
of” the Cambridge-based greats J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth– who could
be seen, in their two presences, genealogically speaking, as
somewhat to their later... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, September 23, 2009,
In :
writing
Having a new book out is still a bit of a thrill, I must admit, even when it's a book of work that is not that new. I have to thank Tony Frazer, of Shearsman Books, for the good production job he did on Songbook, which makes its debut around about now.
The title is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose. An intentional misnomer. Let me explain. I have recently been getting back to doing something I last did in my 20s, writing songs - "proper" songs with verses and choruses and middle eights, and much... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, July 18, 2009,
In :
writing
Tide in, blowy breakers, deep grey-green with silt in it. Sky is wet, bent over. A word “crystallised” in it. Drifting, long-lining, seining, trammelling, trawling, again, and always. And above that, more light, and here comes the evaluation: that everything will evaporate into nothing, that this book will capture nothing, that everything that is narrated here has occurred within the space of a split particle, where there’s nothing, where no one can hear you think. Hello! Sorry at this ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, July 13, 2009,
In :
writing
Immense glitter sparkle in the distance. Split particles show splutters in chardonnay. Fishing with Higgs the bo’sun, fielding for godlets. Keep those figures floundering, flittering. So how do you know that you exist? When your whole life flashes? Can you describe this, Jack? They knew him as a fisherman, not as a fiddler. He flew into the light off the edge of the harbour arm on an old clinker craft with an elliptic stern, and was seen no more. What kind of language is that? What are you ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, July 10, 2009,
In :
writing
Turquoise in the lee of the groyne, a white sheet where the sun is upon it. Turns out this is an unnamed paragraph, about nothing, written in a “hotel of real spies”. A trumpet in the shape of a boat. At first glance, it extruded the body language of convergence, then it became convenient, and then a commodity, and so it goes on, day after day, beginning after ending after beginning, persons and events and horizons in a blur. History turns into salt – to what purpose? We are never told.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, July 7, 2009,
In :
writing
Pale grey-green, almost no waves, tide out. An aircraft disintegrated over mid-Atlantic, very peacefully. Zombies very nice peoples. No, they are vampires. They are Dover sole and plaice, and other flat fish such as dabs, flounders, lemon soles, also brills, turbots, cod and the various types of dogfish, large shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats, lobsters, shrimps and whelks. I love crashing flounders, please. Then your own thoughts start to cluster in. Build your own groyne right here and pu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, July 1, 2009,
In :
writing
A twinkling expanse in the morning sunshine. On a portable radio, sweet talk from across the globe. Sounded like she was singing from a nest of wires. Don’t think about it. The downtown retail sector is in a state of devastation. Hungry creatures roam, look like they’ve been punched senseless selling unsustainable debt to each other. I love my black Moorish bass. But I’ve been beaten over my metaphorical head too, and I’m much too nervous to stand up. (Stop it, you’re hyperventilati... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, June 23, 2009,
In :
writing
Bands of green and blue, little rippling waves. And, may I say, a feather, of diseased appearance. The diseased head of a man. Who gave me the whooping ’flu, you swine? Is that a dog talking? Have we come to this? Take me to the cliff, and drop me there. Let me fall through space, and so become alive. Dolls and ghosts and dogs, daddy and mummy bears, gorillas, pigs and mice and all the hybrids in between. Breeding in a tight corner, sounds almost hooman. I ain’t scared of the sea, but it... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, June 21, 2009,
In :
writing
A dazzling white sheet from afar. A blade shines from horizon to horizon, its light much too white for the eye. Light leaching out of it. Mild, variegated, lacking definition; but with a hard frosty glitter in the distance. Milk and dirt heaving rhythmically, water breathing in and out. Heavy easterly, the water brown with silt inland, and pale green further off, clashing waves in your face. Swirling muck in the shallows. Bumpy and glittering, then clean and clear.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, June 15, 2009,
In :
writing
Well, our new Laureate has now published her first official poem, and here it is.
The official position of Reality Street on the Laureateship is, of course, one of studied indifference. The institution has as much relevance to poetry, or to contemporary life, as - well, the House of Lords with its wigs and knee-breeches, say. Its incumbents have historically been either good poets past their sell-by date or dusty nonentities nobody has read for hundreds of years. In recent times, we've had a r... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, June 4, 2009,
In :
writing
I'm just delving into my journal from 1994 now to help me recall one of several happy memories of David. I was visiting the US and he'd booked me to do a reading in a series he was curating at the Johnny Otis Café in Sebastopol, California (yes, it really was owned by the rhythm & blues singer of that name).
Kathleen Fraser drove me to Sonoma County, and Susan Gevirtz and Cydney Chadwick were there too, also Steve Tills. I stayed overnight in David and Cecelia's house and met young Margaret ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, June 1, 2009,
In :
writing
Good news that Salt Publishing's internet campaign to save its business from going under has had a positive result. The Bookseller reports that Salt received more than 400 orders in a single day in response to its plea to customers to "buy just one book".
Chris and Jen Emery's enterprise has been a shot in the arm for poetry in the UK, and I was happy to respond to the campaign (the book I ordered on this occasion was Chris McCabe's Zeppelins - which has a wit comparable to Tom Leonard, and be... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, May 24, 2009,
In :
writing
The textmusic symposium at Birkbeck College yesterday (Saturday) was a stimulating day of discussion about theory and poetic/musical practice. It's just the kind of area that interests me, and so I was sorry I wasn't able to get to London in time to hear Will Montgomery on the connection between Frank O'Hara and Morton Feldman and Steve Dickison (over from San Francisco) on reggae. I did enjoy David Grubbs (Brooklyn College) on his musical collaboration with Susan Howe, Frances Kruk on her co... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, May 2, 2009,
In :
writing
On 19 April we lost a great English visionary. I use the qualifier deliberately: JG Ballard, perplexed ever since his arrival as a youngster from Shanghai by his newly encountered homeland (see his memoir, Miracles of Life), by its absurd fixation on the past, seems ostensibly an alien observer, at odds with the literary and socio-political mainstream of England. And yet I see him as an exemplar of an English dissident tradition; the nearest comparison among writers might be with Blake.
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, April 14, 2009,
In :
writing
Maggie O'Sullivan's Waterfalls, promised for I forget how many years by Etruscan Books, is out at last. Completed 10 years ago, it's the companion work to red shifts (also published by Etruscan, 2001); the two books are a kind of diptych comprising the poetic project her/story:eye.
This beautiful book draws on Maggie's Irish roots, and on (in her words) "riddle, lore, tale, song, lament, elegy" and "the Great Famine of 1845-52, the clearances, dispossession and exile". Here's a sample spread... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, April 7, 2009,
In :
writing
Last Thursday (2 April) was a great day for visiting London. The sun shone on an eerily quiet capital - commuters and, particularly, bankers appeared to have largely stayed away, greatly afeared of the imagined repercussions from the clash of G20 leaders and "protesters" of various stripes. In the event, there was no such clash on that day.
I had a day off to (a) have lunch with two of my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, (b) lose a couple of intermediary hours browsing bookshops in Charing X Rd and b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, March 22, 2009,
In :
writing
Read at the Runnymede Festival, Royal Holloway University of London, yesterday afternoon. First, we were delayed by a faulty train from Hastings, then by rugby fans, half of them kilted, travelling to Twickenham, then it was hard to find the venue, with the consequence that I missed Robert Sheppard and Ulli Freer while we were wandering around the campus. Met Ulli very briefly just before I finally found the "Management Auditorium"; he was muttering about having to "get to South London" and d... Continue reading ...
Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, March 20, 2009,
In :
writing
In my last post I said "I'm ambivalent about the increasing academicisation of innovative/parallel tradition poetry..." I think there may be one too many syllables in one of the words there, but I hope my meaning is clear, if not the precise detail of my ambivalence. I'm prompted by an announcement by my good friend Robert Sheppard of the proposed launch of a Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry which he is to edit with Scott Thurston (the publisher is Gylphi: www.gylphi.co.uk).
Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, March 15, 2009,
In :
writing
I have been taken to task by one or two subscribers to the UK Poetry discussion list for - well, I'm not sure what for, advocating closing down of discussion about poetry, I guess. To explain: UK Poetry, numbering some couple of hundred subscribers, is hosted by Miami University, Ohio, and dedicated to discourse around contemporary innovative British/Irish poetry. It is a great source of information and, sometimes, intellectual stimulation (though I'm ambivalent about the increasing academici... Continue reading ...
I'm the editor and publisher of Reality Street, and a writer and musician.
More about me on my home page (click link on the left).
