I’m really happy to have a table at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair, this October 24th Friday and 25th Saturday at Conway Hall in Holborn, London. https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/
A poem from FPPP, being launched at the fair - a found photo poem
I have been attending the fair for over a decade, and in recent years, it has become a really important part of my year. Recently excavating old essays I’ve written I came across something I wrote on commission for the fair in 2015 and it struck me how much I had taken from the enterprise over the years, building to the recent presence I’ve been able to have there. After last year’s fair I was asked by Derek Beaulieu to contribute some thoughts on the fair for his Minute review. Below is the piece I wrote which sums up my feelings on the SPF.
I should also say the fair always provokes me into new publications, or draws energy towards making and collaborating. This year two new things are coming, with Sampson Low, a small anthology of poems from my time as poet in residence at Shaldon Zoo (entitled A Zed and Two O’s) and a limited edition postcard pack of found photo poems (entitled FPPP) which I think breaks important ground for me in conceptual photo poetry. Please come by and visit me and my friends running my stall.
Andrew Kotting and I at the 2022 fair
From the Minute Review "I chose to be a poet to nullify possible ambitions that might’ve otherwise occurred to me. Since being a poet, I have long wished to strip out all ambition that might lie outside of a few general experiences. The first is an excited playfulness at writing and making blab blab blab. The second, most importantly, is to seek nothing more than deeply felt human connection through collaborating, teaching, event organising, performing, attending festivals, originating projects, publishing and the like. From these things many of my best friends have come, and some I would consider familial, and I am proud that around me is a large group of people I care for and admire. This kind of connection requires a considered environment. It requires a light-handed courteous generosity that some would mistakenly call curatorial but is more akin to familial (I use the word again deliberately). This is all complex and I don’t care about the specifics, but all to say it is present, massively so, in spades at the Small Publishers Fair, thanks to Helen Mitchell and Caspar Evans, and Julie Mitchell and Colin Sackett, and on and on down the vast majority of exhibitors, poets, printers, publishers, writers, artists, book makers and visitors who attend, in my opinion for me for me. It is something I felt so profoundly in 2022 when the fair held a retrospective of my publications, that people were encouraging, optimistic, kind, and beforehand, and absolutely in the years since. There is a collaborative, generative, communal spirit, that is all the more powerful for not being conceptualised or theorised or literally planned but is the byproduct of its organisers character and vision, its venue, and its rootedness in people making things in different ways that compliment, whose hands are inky and full of heavy objects. It’s unpretentious, convivial, active. It is an energised human enterprise around often singular practices. This must, at some level, come from the specifics of what happens there, from Andrew Kotting’s immersive 3-D exhibition, from the intimacy of the green room, the grandeur of the library, from the careful swell of the books being stacked, the views from the balconies, hiding for lunch. 2024 was as ever before, inspiring, and for me personally, special, as I met friends visiting from around the world, such as my publisher sal nunchakov, up from Portugal, whom id never met before, at the same time four of my students helped me with my table, charming anyone within arms reach and recontextualising, powerfully, what a life writing poetry might mean to them. I saw through their eyes what a welcoming intensity comes from the Small Publishers Fair and once again the experience often a concentrated reminder that my own personal ambition has settled on wanting no more than wanting the company of the good people who somewhat share a hobby of mine in an environment we might not consider remarkable, but is so, often."