My book Fights features in this Vispo exhibition at the Poetry Library


Really happy that Fights, which attempts to synthesise the visual with the written word features at the Poetry Library for the next few months.
This exhibition, curated by David Miller and Chris McCabe, focuses on the ways in which poetry has moved into a visual dimension in work by recent practitioners. In particular, the emphasis is on the way that individual poets have incorporated their writing in or with visual images, or pushed their writing into something inherently visual, either lucidly, vividly or extravagantly. Among those whose work is exhibited are Thomas A Clark and Laurie Clark, Gavin Selerie, Liliane Lijn, James Harvey, Sarah Kelly and David Miller.

Saison Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall, Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 8pm
Free - 12 February 2013, 11:00am - 14 April 2013, 20:00pm

And How It Goes by Anselm Hollo (I miss him)

Beyond the sadness of losing Anselm Hollo as a human being and a poet, his death has grown into something that continues to have significance for me because in his work I find an intense feeling that he lived how I live, through his writing, but 50 years ahead of me. Obviously there are enormous differences, none more so than he was a finer poet than I'm ever likely to be. Yet his work possesses a sense of place and a sense of humour, and trickery, and darkness, that I seek to possess. I've read so many poems of his in the last week that have made me feel a little overwhelmed that I have been to these places and hope to do these things, in life and in poetry. The people around me whom I love seem to be echoed by those he loves. He seems to have walked London as though it would not be his for long, as I often do. He dedicates poems as I have done. He has energy for new relationships, for endless writing, as I do. Now he is dead, 40 years on from writing these poems that have moved me so. It doesn't make me very sad, just makes me feel the inevitability of life and makes me appreciate how much my life is full of warmth and health and lovely humans, and lovely things, like poem below. For my friends!

And How It Goes 
                                                          by Anselm Hollo (1967)

Zoo-day, today
with the 2 young

"What animal
           did you like best?"
"That man"

She's three, more perfect
            than any future
                           I or any man
                           will lead her to

but now, to the gates
            and wait for the boat
                           by the Regent's canal

we stand in a queue
all tired, speechless

A line from Villon
           sings into my head:
"Paradis paint"
           "A painted paradise
where there are harps and lutes"

Yes and no children
but who say such pretty things
            for me to inscribe
                           in one of my notebooks
with the many blank pages
            marking the days
                           when I feel as forsaken as
                                              balding Francois
      
       who also found
in himself            
                        the need to adore

       as different as my stance is
       here, in a queue of mums & dads
                            down the green slope
                                           to the canal

- when he wrote to the Virgin
            hypocrite, setting his words
                            to the quavers
of his mother's voice

             le bon Dieu
                              knows where he'd left her

At least
                              I'm holding her hand
           she's here, my daughter
                              he is here

                                                       "my son

the lives of poets
        even the greatest, are dull
                        and serve as warnings"

To say this, suddenly
            here, in the queue
                           would no doubt be brave

He's half asleep,
clutching a plastic lion

"The thing is, they could not
           get out of themselves
                           any better than these
who also wait
                                              for a boat
                     - o that it were drunken
                                   on what wild seas -
they didn't
         even try, just griped about it
                        or made little idols
for brighter moments ... "

The boat has arrived
         and there,
                      the elephant's trumpet
                                   farewell

Her weight on my knees
His head on my shoulder
                          here
                            we
                              go

We, best-loved animals
one, two, three
         and as illuminated
         as we'll ever be

Enemies: Camarade IV

A thank you to everyone who contributed and attended on saturday night. There were a few hundred in attendance and the performances were inspiring. I’m very happy the Enemies project could begin in such an atmosphere of pluralism and ingenuity, and that everyone is so enthusiastic about the project. Here is the footage from the event: 
Thanks to Ben Morris for his poster design magic, and to David Kelly for his usual help on the night. Gratitude too to the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England for making it possible, and the Rich Mix, as ever, for their generosity.

The Dark Would is coming

The Dark Would preview event at the Poetry Library last night was as generative and inclusive an event as would be expected for an anthology as necessary and timely as the Dark Would itself. Philip Davenport has poured two years of his life into building a document that should stand for a moment I have been skirting around for around the same amount of time - that is the point where genre definitions between avant garde poetry and art die away and the practise of text becomes the join between what has been previously perceived as two wholly different artforms despite their obvious objective similarity. The conversations I had many years ago with my friend Ben Morris when he lamented how Bob Cobbing had not been on his art degree and I said the same about the immense myriad of sonic artists like Ghedalia Tazartes not being discussed in poetry circles. The introductions I tried to make between those regular on the avant garde poetry reading circuit in London and those who were seen as performance artists or text artists, purely out of my own curiosity and obvious feeling that there was so much that could be shared between the two genres is really now becoming redundant. The inclusion of Patrick Coyle, Holly Pester, Tamarin Norwood, Hannah Silva and others in the recent Bloodaxe anthology speaks to that. Philip has gone a step further, specifically in the world of visual text, and concretely laid down a marker for the future, for the rest of the century in fact. Seeing the book's proof I was genuinely bowled over by it's form and content, it's range and it's ambition. It will be a step toward a sloughing off of the old guards and barriers and a new dialogue, long begun, has an excuse to increase in volume until it is one noise. I'm very proud my work with Anatol Knotek, a great collaborative partner, features in the book, and that I'm alongside so many peers that I admire like Emily Critchley and Holly Pester, as well as those who have been absolutely pivotal in my development as a poet and a person, like Carol Watts, Tim Atkins and Tom Raworth. 


Bled Suburbs with Ryan Van Winkle for his Commiserate project

Ryan Van Winkle is a kindred spirit. Since meeting him in Bulgaria he has become a friend and a collaborator, someone whose energy and spirit is unmistakeable, and someone who has managed to often surprise me with a rare combination of characteristics - dynamism and vociferousness alongside a profound sense of humility and kindness and eagerness for the new. Alongside his myriad of projects he has begun a new venture to do with collaboration, very much in tandem with Enemies, and I'm really delighted to see his work in tandem with a whole group of other writers and artists. For the second issue of his Commiserate series, he has posted one of the many poems we've written, from a work that'll feature in the Enemies book, called The Burbs. http://ryanvanwinkle.com/commiserate-part-deux-sj-fowler

Commiserate Part Deux: SJ Fowler


SJ Fowler: Enemy, friend, bear-lover
As mentioned last month, ‘Commiserate’ is an experiment in poetic collaboration born out of SJ Fowler’s inspiring Enemiesproject. As I’ll be down in London’s Rich Mix on the 9th as part of his ‘Comrades IV‘ line up I thought I’d share one of the five collaborations between SJ & I. Dig into Fowler’s ‘Enemies’ site and I’ll be sure to let you know when his big book of collaborations comes out in September. If the names associated with the project are any indication, it will be a dynamic, challenging publication featuring cutting edge work from throughout Europe.

This month: SJ Fowler

RVW says: I was genuinely flattered when SJ asked if we could make a sequence of poems together. I had no idea what to expect or if I would totally embarrass myself / ourselves in this process. Not only was Fowler generous in his encouragement but he also seemed fearless in a way that was very freeing. I could toss out insane non-sequitors, drop an F-bomb, shift the poem radically and know that he’d run with it. Further, I think we had a genuine conversation though the work – we both stole from our discussions or emails and it was heartening to see Fowler use my own words against me. I can’t say enough kind things about this avant-garde provacatour. I remain inspired by his work and his commitment to the form.
Fowler says: ‘The Burbs is a collaborative writing through of the city space that is not the centre, and so these poems, dotted across the globe, are neither periphery or core. The goal was to leave behind who wrote what, and become poetically annulled, as is appropriate in a celebration of the places people only go to live’.

The Poem Says:
Bled Suburbs
if there is a date to make
what if I arrive injured?
swinging a cane with pleasure, singing
this is all coming together
sighing
a student of Hebrew
a Scot
delayed at the threshold by the English
rewriting / a marsh
that kills an army
blue cross
dark red beef cross family feelings
let’s abandon the discussion in
favour of poetry that is comedy
that is not song
that is what time slows down to
stick a pin in meat
friends
I have a yellow heart
an apple
a burned-out physic Dodge
I can psychic drive
38 dollars and
desert desert desert
a wilderness of mirrors
in my left pocket, no
right pocket, rain
where my right pocket should be
You are right
to ask questions. You are left
turn at the light. I have one
thing I never talk about
another I can’t stop breathing.
What is a name
if you don’t know the eye,
the color red?
so I’m trained now
steven did you know, that even if you
have bad knees and can crouch down,
you can actually lean your torso
forwards from your hips? it’s called
bending over ooo tiny rabbit, i see your moon
but your health is crucial
to the inflatable you can’t resist
puffing air into your chest and pushing
into rain and I only remember
my mother’s maiden name
when they ask, steven did you hear
the shaking keeps you steady
you should know

The Little Magazines Project


The Little Magazines Project is a listing of UK print-based poetry magazines, from 1945 to the present, with selected details of contents for some of the magazines and in a few cases full indexes. It’s a project David Miller developed at Nottingham Trent University, and can be seen as an online parallel resource to the book he wrote with Richard Price (British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’, The British Library / Oak Knoll Press, 2006). It is available at http://www2.ntu.ac.uk/littlemagazines/ and I thoroughly recommend you checking out an invaluable resource for British poetic history.

Poems in Beeswax



I submitted poems to Beeswax in 2010. They were taken in 2011. The magazine was prepared in 2012 and now it arrives in 2013. The double issue is an exquisite object.

BEESWAX 7/8: CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY
We are extremely excited to announce our first double issue, Beeswax 7/8, which features fantastic poetry, fiction, visual poetry, and visual art, plus illustrations by featured artists Jesse Duquette and Jon Stich. The issue features a double-size accordion-style cover (letterpressed inside and out) and hand-stitched binding.

ISSUE 7 CONTRIBUTORS:
Trevor Calvert • Diana Aehegma • Ajay Vishwanathan • Crag Hill • CC Hart •
Rebecca Eddy • Sarah Layden • Grant Hazard Outerbridge • Bryan Zubalsky • SJ Fowler

ISSUE 7 FEATURED ARTIST: Jesse Duquette
ISSUE 8CONTRIBUTORS:
Steffi Drewes • Hugh Behm-Steinberg • Audri Sousa • Kathleen Lane • Marissa Bell Toffoli • Elliot Harmon • M.J. Nicholls
ISSUE 8 FEATURED ARTIST: Jon Stich

translations in the Spanish by Mario Dominguez Parra on Revista Kokoro

http://revistakokoro.com/incidentesfowler.html

So proud to have had 7 of the incidents of antisemitism translated into Spanish by the remarkable translator Mario Dominguez Parra and published by the fantastic Revista Kokoro journal, based in Spain. Im in great company here, amongst the work of my friend Juan Andres Garcia Roman and translations of Alice Notley in this issue. Mario's immense labour is a really remarkable benefit to my work.

anselm hollo obituary by Pierre Joris on his Nomadics blog


In Front of The Boulder Dushanbe Tea House…

… a few years ago, Anselm & Jane, Jerry & Diane, Nicole & me.
AH&JR&PJAlso: a lovely obit by Steven Fowler in 3ammagazine, one para of which goes:
This is a man who wrote through his life – who skewered life with his work, who affirmed his being alive in poetry, and made things new there too. Anselm Hollo was a viking – he looked like one, he wrote like one, and I am told, he often lived like one. He published over 40 books, and untold numbers of translations into and from Finnish, German, Swedish and French. In 2001 he was elected the United States anti-laureate. He lived for 78 years, and for over 60 of them, he wrote.
You can read the whole piece here.
Also, today (Thursday 31st) he Finnish Obituary in  Helsingin Sanomat (the biggest Finnish newspaper), written by one of the editors of the Cultural Section. Anselm is remembered as having been “Finlands link to the Beat Movement in US”. (via Leevi Lehto on FB):
FinnishObitAH

anselm hollo obituary by Tom Raworth

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anselm-hollo-poet-translator-and-teacher-8473828.html


In a famous 1965 photograph he sits on the steps of the Albert Memorial behind Trocchi and Ginsberg. His hair is dark; his eyes slant. His clothes, as always, are black.

Anselm Hollo was a major poet, a prolific and fine translator and an inspiring teacher. His death is a loss to the world of letters and intelligence. He was born in Helsinki five years before the Winter War into a cosmopolitan and intellectual family. His professor father translated Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Henry James into Finnish, his mother taught music, his grandfather Paul, a chemist, invented the Walden Inversion. A visit to him in Germany as a small child left Anselm the memory of walking past Hitler's Reich-Chancellery. The home language was German. His sister taught him ...

anselm hollo 1934 – 2013


(Image by Alexander Kell – taken in London 2012)
I cannot pretend I knew Anselm Hollo. I met him just last year, in what would be the last months of his life, which ended a few days ago. I witnessed one of the last readings he ever gave, if perhaps actually the very last, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. I helped organise the reading and I had the chance to spend an afternoon with him. Even if I cannot say I knew him really, I met him, and before that meeting, and I am sure for many years after it, he will have a presence in my life through his poetry. For there are bonds between him and I, and it is my opportunity now, in the wake of his dying, to make them real in the act of a thorough, if primarily private, recognition. This is a man who wrote through his life – who skewered life with his work, who affirmed his being alive in poetry, and made things new there too. Anselm Hollo was a viking – he looked like one, he wrote like one, and I am told, he often lived like one. He published over 40 books, and untold numbers of translations into and from Finnish, German, Swedish and French. In 2001 he was elected the United States anti-laureate. He lived for 78 years, and for over 60 of them, he wrote.
His life was one of breaking new ground, both in the literal ashes of post war Europe and in the redefinition of what poetry might do to us and for us. He also came to stand for the singular role of what a poet might pursue – to evidence a new kind of holistic understanding – as a translator, with a reach beyond single cultures and ‘great’ figures, as an anthologist, who is a collector of specimens and not a accountant of poetries, as an editor, a teacher, an organiser, a friend to poets and a community in himself. He was completely unique in his voice, instantly recognisable, eminently witty, underhanded, profound and disarming. He was gifted in understatement and ethereal profundity. He was prolific and generous. He was a poet’s poet.
And as many of us writing now are the underlings to his achievement, so he dragged with him so much from a past that might’ve otherwise been occluded or lost in the rearranging world of his youth. Finland, always a place of quixoticism, of underappreciated extremes, spent the better part of its modern history under Swedish yoke, and the great scholars of the fin de siecle, like Hollo’s father, rode a wave of pioneering linguistic and cultural reconstruction, of archiving, of repatriation. Hollo was a child of this movement, perhaps the most important literary Finnish traveller who ever lived, for he took this spirit of newness, of cosmopolitanism, of national energy to the world, unable to leave behind the dryest of Nordic wit and poetic noir. Unwilling to let go of his propensity to admire and inculcate mishearings, misspeakings, mistranslations, he offered this gift to poetries in Germany, England, and America. This is a man who moved to Germany during the immediate post war period, then fled to England when it became too stable, and then again ditched London in the 60s for America. This is a poet who spoke his time in his poetry, who chased it down.
Returning from his last trip to his old home in London, where he was amongst some of his finest friends and peers, those who we can now only envy and take inspiration from for their innovation and energy and daring, he faced the kind of battle against ill health that even his near indestructible constitution could not hold out against. His name lives on in the children of his great contemporaries, more than one of them being blessed with the name Anselm, and we should take time in the wake of his death to mark the passing of a generation that began much of what we might hope to continue, so that we don’t err into thinking we are original while in the shadow of those who have done it all before but have just been stupidly neglected, so that we can build on what took a lifetime to produce, and so that we might try to write well, because Anselm Hollo wrote well. He was an immensely good poet and it is a loss to the world and to poetry that he has died.
I significantly recommend you buy his books.

your friend

By Anselm Hollo.

he said this
he said that
when pressed
as to which
he said nothing at all

in his country the weather
was mostly rainy

he tried to ride horses
they didn’t go or went
too fast

he punched them in the head
he fell off them

he tried to love women
tried to write poems
even his fellow men
their wives their children and cattle
he tried to love
but he didn’t know
how or what was
or was good for him
at all

whatever it was
it kept punching him
in the head to make him
fall off

so he blamed them for it
all of them fellow men women
children cattle poems and horses

many a rainy
day you could hear him
yelling ‘it’s all
your fault’

after that things
were all right for a while
until the next try

dear world renga

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dear-world-renga/

 These poems are the result of a collaborative workshop called ‘Theft Renga’ i ran at the launch of the ‘Dear world & everything in it’ anthology launch, at the Saison Poetry Library, at the Southbank centre, in London, January 24th 2013. Around a dozen poets were asked to rapidly write sequential lines in response to one another, upon a piece of paper passed clockwise around the group, with reference to themes decided by the group and, if needed or desired, with the aid of plagiarised lines lifted from books in the Poetry Library’s collection.

 These poems were written collectively by myself, Angus Chisholm, Taniel Yusef, Tim Wells, Iman Sid, Becky Cremin, Dennison Smith, Mitch Albert, James Wilkes, Elizabeth Guthrie and Chris Kerr.

Poem in Portuguese, translated by Ricardo Marques

http://revistaagio.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/oni-por-sj-fowler.html I recently had the pleasure to meet a remarkable Portuguese poet living in London, Ricardo Marques, who shares many of my pre-occupations, within and beyond poetry. Our worlds overlapped through Ana Hudson's project of offering contemporary Portuguese poets to an English language readership, and I have a sure feeling his work and presence in London will become intertwined with the activities I'm trying to maintain. He has been kind enough to turn his gift for translation towards some of my work, including this poem from Red Museum

ONI por SJ Fowler

ONI
(SJ Fowler, 1983-) 

Os demónios japoneses não têm pernas e são do sexo feminino.
Eu tenho um profundo respeito pela perspicácia da sua cultura.
O espaço da galeria é dividida em quatro, quatro faixas,
braços estendem-se de uma sala circular central,
centrada por sua vez pela onda interna,
a escultura aquática de Onchi Koshiro.
As maravilhas da actual era da arte.