Posted by Ken Edwards on Thursday, February 4, 2010,
In :
Reality Street
Yesterday (Wednesday 3 February) I travelled to BBC Broadcasting House in London to record an interview with the redoubtable Ian McMillan for Radio 3's The Verb about Bill Griffiths' Collected Earlier Poems. The poet Sean Bonney was also interviewed about what Bill had meant to him. I hope they'll also be broadcasting a snippet of Bill reading from a CD I took in.  We talked a bit about how Bill was just getting known towards the end of his life for his work on Geordie pit dialect - indeed, I... 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:  (original image here) They sho... Continue reading ...
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 Tuesday, September 1, 2009,
In :
Reality Street
Today Reality Street publishes
Botsotso: an anthology of contemporary South African poetry. Here's what I wrote for the preface of the book:  In April 2004, at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry (CCCP), I encountered Ike Mboneni Muila from Soweto. He had previously been compared by someone to Tom Raworth, for his high-octane delivery. Opening the Saturday evening session, he amazed me by riffing flawlessly and rapidly in several languages: Afrikaans, English and more than one nativ...
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 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 :
undetermined
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 Wednesday, April 1, 2009,
In :
Reality Street
Last week I announced Reality Street's forthcoming publication of David Bromige's Collected Poems. Work on that essential volume is only just getting going, but in the meantime our other major current project, a collection of Bill Griffiths' poetry from his earliest work up until 1980 - the period that roughly precedes the Salt collection The Mud Fort - has progressed apace. Bill (pictured above) died in 2007. You can read my obituary of him here. He was a poet of wonderful invention and ener... Continue reading ...
I'm delighted to confirm that Reality Street will be collaborating with New Star Books, Vancouver, Canada, to co-publish David Bromige's Collected Poems. The book is being edited by Ron Silliman with help from Bob Perelman. We're hoping to get it ready next year (2010).  David (pictured above by Andrea Auge) is not currently in the best of health but he's looking forward to this. There has been some confusion about whether the collection would be limited to David's later books, but I can confirm... 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). The ... Continue reading ...
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 ...
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About me
| Ken Edwards |
| Hastings, East Sussex |
I'm the editor and publisher of Reality Street, and a writer and musician.
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