Featured Poet #6 - Jon Stone

Lara

Lara, it is your deaths that make me marvel.
Not the pistols that stud your chafed-up hips,
alexandrite earrings of your bottom

but the way you swallow-dive, boots locked,
onto a stint of sandstone and crumple and
not your plait’s strop, dosed in jeweller’s rouge

but the boulder massaging your hapless spine
that straightens the metals of my eye and
not the oil slick of you in your wetsuit

but how you buck hard enough to break
as you drown in a deep sea grotto and
not your strut or your small, hard ‘t’s

but how, set alight, you still do ‘demure’,
gasp and expire in a sponge of moss and
not the sheer vastness of your swimming pool

but live wires caressing you in the kitchen
of a slowly capsizing icebreaker and
not the calibre of your voice actresses

but the wolves who worry your jetstream
legs to uneven kebab-shanks and
not to be your butler or obstacle course

but the Arctic waters tenderly biting
through your Parka’s scruff sealmeat and
not be the boat you climb into in Venice

but the spear sprung by a pressure pad that
tastes your knee, that you fall around and
Lara, don’t bend to pull up your sports socks

but fluff the jump again for me, would you.


Near Extremes 4


Where I come from it’s the other way round:
Seroquel’s slipped by the fistful into
ministers’ snifters, curing them (fingers x’d)
of such spells where they intuit war things
are squirreled beneath every unturned stone,

and when shell-shocked or down-on-their-luck
ex-squaddies mistake the knifeplay of light
for a gun barrel’s flinting we all hit the dirt
because after all, the odds are they’re right –
in the streets: hajjis. Hajjis everywhere we look.


Three Celan Poems

I.

THAT ANGER’S BROKEN HER EAR.
Mid-day Monday, undone, counting
foreign brutes.

Drink
out, my almond.


II.

I CURE HER, THE AXE HAS GOT BLUNT.
I cure her, the artists nick timber.

I cure her, desperate that sin and silt
hail down or hang ten.
Desperate assembly throwback.

I cure her, see lemongrass leaping,
the antsy kazoo-flux.


III.

THE GNATS HAVE STOPPERED THE WELL.
Frederick’s aghast
the way sometimes words are alarming.
Hera gets switched on. The mower
and the iron wander, hawk-legged.

--

Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel, where he co-produces both Sidekick Books, a publisher of collaborative poetry books, and arts magazine Fuselit. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009 in the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows, was released by Scottish press Happenstance. He has also released a co-authored pamphlet, No, Robot, No!, through Forest Publications with Kirsten Irving and a full collection, School of Forgery, is due from Salt in 2012.


[eds. note: 'Three Celan Poems' look different due to the fact Blogspot wanted to make the capitalised lines way too big, so I had to use my nonexistent HTML skills.]

Identity Parade, Part 3

Andy Brown

I’ve only briefly read Andy Brown before, but he’s supervising one of my closest friend’s PhD, and he raves about him, so I went into this selection of his poetry with a sense of expectation. The first piece, ‘The Last Geese’, is beautifully descriptive, pleasingly rigid in its form, a sense of clarity and successful mimesis (well, as successful as mimesis can be). It is chopped down and honed, impressive and unflashy, entirely succinct. As such, on the odd occasion his imagery gets a bit more whimsical (“geese the size of the wind”) it doesn’t quite work. Nor does the conclusion: it stretches for an enigmatic, imagistic ending: “the unseen echoing back”. In a poem all about the seen. The problem with it is the contrast, the sense of change the poem seems to be trying to convey, both underestimates and overestimates what came before. The seen is documented meticulously, mimetically, as if it needs to be clung to, to keep; the geese leave “through the pink keyhole of the horizon”. I guess in dropping in “the unseen” it draws too much attention to what the poem wants to achieve, not letting it simply convey what it arguably already has. Or maybe it’s just that ‘the unseen’ is such a prevalent force in American philosophically-tinged poetry at the moment, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. Nonetheless, it’s very good. Probably, for me, the best-written poem I’ve read in here so far. And of course, one could read plenty into this subversively ‘surface-based’ poem.

‘A Poem of Gifts’ is very, very good. Although no-one has managed to write this sort of thing better than Tim Lilburn, for me at least. Most poets probably won’t. In fact, this is why I probably won’t go on commenting on Brown: he’s just not Lilburn, but is similar enough in style and content to be immediately associable with him. Most assured poet in here thus far, though, I think, and definitely worth reading. I’m not sure why I so infrequently hear about his work? Same as with Burnside, I guess, with whom Brown has collaborated in the past.


Judy Brown


Judy Brown’s lyrics are compelling, their narratives asserting their originality completely naturally and without showmanship in their apt and striking descriptions (skin “smooth as Greek cheese”, “power chords/of police helicopters”, both from ‘Peckham Poem(s)’) and the personality of her poetic voice. None of the pieces are exceptional in their subject matter, but the quality of her phrasing, which renders familiar themes new, and the power of her observation:

‘Are you a local girl, the man asks.
Yes, I am, I say, hoping to prove it
With my pound coin, which he palms,
His eyes already travelling on.'

make her a writer worth reading.


Collette Bryce


Yawn. More of it! Bryce’s ‘The Smoke’ is a faultless piece of writing, a lovely, neatly and sparsely constructed lyric. But so what? What is it doing to stand out? I’ve read hundreds of British lovely neat sparse lyrics and I’m sick of them. I want something big, something that stands out, something that can match the innovation of the American poetry of the last 20 or so years. We have Pyrnne and Denise Riley, but they’re barely ever mentioned. And of course Muldoon. There seems to be a collective lack, or a collective provinciality in ambition in a lot of the contemporary UK poets I read. Either that or just polite rip off of Yank post-Language poetry.

Okay, back to Collette. Or not. I have nothing to say, really. Finely crafted, has the potential for mainstream appeal. Entirely bland. (I apologise to Collette Bryce for ranting and not actually commenting on the poetry properly. I’m sure it’s not really as uninteresting as I’m making out to be.)


Matthew Caley


Looks alarmingly like Johnny Rotten. First poem ‘Acupuncture’ is good, very funny, reminiscent of the stuff everyone seemed to want to write after ‘The Harbour Beyond the Movie’ came out (but not boring and derivative) and the New York stuff we all like to try not to write too much of. I’d like it more if it didn’t remind me so much of Hughes’s ‘Bride and Groom Lay Hidden for Three Days’. The problem I have with his poetry, actually, having read over it quite a few times, is simply that its absurdism is so standard and predictable and the writing is full of dropped names. The former is fine, in that at least it’s nice to read; the latter is the killer: it spoils the musicality of his poetry, bogging it down with obscure and arguably self-indulgent textual referencing and postmodern trickery.


Siobhan Campbell


While perfectly adequate, her first poem, ‘Almost in Sight’, doesn’t transcend its being another straight lyric about the speaker being a child, despite its political under/overtones. Yep. That’s really all I have to say.


Vahni Capildeo

I saw Capildeo read once and it was an uncomfortable experience. She didn’t seem to keen to be on stage, and I could barely catch a word of what was being said. Her first poem is called ‘Lilies’. Great, I thought. A female poet writing about flowers. And how pleasantly happily presumptuously wrong I was. Capildeo is pretty fucking good. Her opening piece is riddled with scent, concepts and ideas conveyed in smell, in “Vaginal cyprine”, the poem a “claw-shape of undersea diction”. The rest of her poems don’t fare so well, for me, but they are at least inventive in their language, and bold in their vague narratives of time, place and senses, the three intermingling into cogent lyric.


Melanie Challenger


Mmmm. Challenger is good. She seems keen to capture things – a whale, a photograph – with an impressively reshaping phenomenological vigour, transforming the act of viewing an inanimate, once animate thing into an act of descriptive, philosophic meditation. “O that I might love my unbeautying.” Occasionally her desire to depict it new leads to overwritten or overwrought phrasing, but this is, for me, entirely justified by the stretching of her images towards something newly represented, even if they sometimes don’t hit their mark.

“Why can’t flesh give the lie/To immunity?”

UEA Writers #1 - Ágnes Lehóczky

The first UEA-associated writer to be featured is poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Her first collection Budapest to Babel, from which the first poem is taken, is a favourite of mine; a complex and original debut that not only forces and encourages the reader to engage with its tricky syntax and innovative linguistics but rewards them in plentitudes for doing so. There are echoes of Heideggerian and Derridean philosophy in her work, as well as American post-Language poetry (and of course Agnes Nemes Nagy), as it confronts and continually defamiliarises and reinvigorates language without every losing its humane connection with the reader. The second poem we are lucky enough to be featuring is from a second collection currently in progress, more information on which will be forthcoming as and when. Enjoy! [NB. These two poems are supposed to be block formatted, but Blogger refuses to allow me to justify them. So, with apologies to and the consent of Agnes, just pretend there's a straight line of text running down the right hand side of the poems.]


Nárcisz’s breakfast letter


I will simply tell you what I can see on this table, here.
No, not on that table but on the one that floats. In the
window. The one that moves with the hour. Its lustrous
objects, some of them latent, some obvious, layer by
layer half-sheltered behind each other like a mock-up of
some insipid geology, travel by the horizon. I will tell
you. Although it’s not easy to stop. Seeing inside. A
crooked vase. Bursting flowers. They burst on the
glass. I do not know what sort but not sunflowers and
the vase is not blue of any kind. I could ask someone
and if they did not know they could ask someone and if
they did not know. Apples piled on top of each other
buoyant in a bowl relatively visible: curvaceous torsos,
perpendicularly squashing against one another with a
negligible force unit of kilo Pascal. Though, weight
nullifies for those who only watch. Did you know that
despite the apparent struggle, these apples strive for
equalization? They say. A kitchen knife tilted on its
side. Its glossy metal edge reflects another ceiling,
another sky, blurs it, blurs its white. The texture of air
woven between the metal and the white escapes and
floods the room. The razor’s edge facing down the
surface of the table reflects unknown darkness, a
darkness duplicate. The intimate recollections of the
two. A chunk of butter. Left outside sunbathing in the
light yellow light of early afternoon melting into its
own outline. Then the butter expands and steps out of
itself. It becomes smeared on the glass. I read that
objects have no contours, only oscillating transitions. I
don’t know if it is true. Perhaps the replica of it is true.
An eggshell in a gaudy eggcup, its top torn off with a
zigzagged motion. A mineralized minuscule skull,
drained, after an elongated tribal ritual. But this time no
religion, no ideology. An embroidered egg cap, a
Sunday outfit. Still warm from incubating the freshly
boiled egg. If you were here you would slip into the
needlework’s inner textile and reel up the story of the
thread stitched vice versa. If it wasn’t too late. Look,
these objects are travellers. Wait. Only a few more
things here. A light green net bag; it is more pistachio.
A fishnet fishless. Or a marionette collapsed after the
hand dropped it. Yet it seems it wakes again, stretches
with the stretching of the sun. It all changes by the
second. Let’s hurry up. It’s not easy to erect a world.
Outside. A jam jar with lumps of marmalade. Left
open. The lid is chequered; red and white, red and
white. This pattern restricted to the circle of the rim
continues outside the rim too, it brims over it,
inaudibly. But this would be a detour and we must stay,
we must stay here, with a facsimile table that’ll soon
depart. The table that is still here…just…


Monday, Midsummer

It’s Monday again. And you are always already gone. I
wanted to spend the longest day with you. Instead
you took the train home shuffling in your head all the
reasons why I am not accompanying you into the
warm tunnels of three enduring midsummer nights.
Why I stand still like a planet unsure whether to
proceed towards the North or the South. For three
never-ending days. You see, the old painter was
curious whether you lived in this town. He sketched
your face still with his eyes. He wanted to smear
silvery blue and copper colours on his canvas. It was
such a bright night, I could not sleep. The most
perseverant insomnia of the sun. The same thing
happened with the actor. He wanted to know about
certain dates and places. He wanted to be your orbit.
He wanted to make you converse. So that he could
secretly erase the line between night and day. So that
you would never go to sleep. I was holding onto a
small pebble in my palm. When I woke I saw it was
your hand. This pebble is a rock. This pebble is a rock
face. The face of a rock. Such a bright night, I could
not sleep. Footsteps in my eardrum. Throbbing
definitely louder. Is there someone leaping up the
stairway? Is this you arriving? That night a ghost
stopped me in the street and asked about words. My
words. He asked how they sell. He was wearing a ten-
gallon hat and smoked a cigar. A drunken spectre. No
outlines. Wingless. Or with very rudimentary wings.
When I queried his knowledge he turned back into a
frog. Into an odd local who swears he never said a
word. And shuts the pub door quietly after himself.
Leaving only a tiny piece of fabric caught by the door.
The corner of his coat. It was such a bright night. I
could not sleep. I saw him again the other day in the
pub. Bespectacled. Old faced. Muttering my words,
telling me that the nights were so bright he couldn’t
sleep. Burying his face in the pages of his notebook.
His notebook was his face. That night I dreamt of
another solstice. I was buried alive in a catacomb
wrapped tightly in white linen. Always the
underground cities after all. Labyrinths of minerals.
Crypts of solar eclipses. Mummified moments. Good
soil. The stunning system of air holes. This way
memory is corporate. This way memories are parched
like the monks of Brno. Many parched monks with
mouths agape resting horizontally in a row. They
almost look alive. I once wrote about this. A long time
ago. But now, since you asked, I must remind myself
of a Monday so unalterably stationary. The
subterranean dialogues of three days and three nights.
What’s a great conversationalist? What is time? You
ask when we pass by an acrylic memorial plaque lost
in a cobbled cul-de-sac. I shrug my shoulders. I do not
know. I can only see an opaque river. Milky. Cloudy.
Transparent. Allowing light to pass. Flicking away in
gallons of silver tea. In porcelain. The earth’s axis tilted.


--

Ágnes Lehóczky is a Hungarian-born poet and translator. She studied for her Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at Pazmany Peter University of Hungary (1994-2001) then completed a Creative Writing MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia with a distinction in 2006. She is currently completing a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at UEA where she was teaching Creative Writing on the Undergraduate Programme. She has two short poetry collections, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002) by Universitas published in Budapest, Hungary, both written in Hungarian.

Her first English collection was published by Egg Box Publishing in 2008 and is entitled Budapest to Babel. She is this year’s recipient of the Arthur Welton Poetry Award and has recently been selected as the winner of the Daniil Pashkoff Prize 2010 in poetry administered by international Writers Ink. She appeared on ‘The Forum’ on the BBC’s World Service. She is currently working on her second collection in English to be published by Egg Box in 2010/2011. Her collection of essays on the poetry of Agnes Nemes Nagy are to be published in 2010/2011 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. From September 2010 she is teaching creative writing on the Masters course at the University of Sheffield.

Identity Parade, Part Two

Simon Barraclough

I’ve never been especially keen on Barraclough’s poetry. I don’t know, it just doesn’t move me at all. But it does have mainstream appeal without being especially typical of the kind of poetry that generally sells well, and I can respect that. The selection of poems here aren’t doing anything to change my mind. His rhyme works sometimes, annoys at others. ‘Fridgidaire’ is a nicely nasty lyric, with Northern-feeling scenery, a pleasing sense of time and place, and ‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ is a lovely love poem. He’s simply not for me.


Paul Batchelor

Paul Batchelor’s poetry is engagingly, frustratingly difficult. I’m still not sure quite what I make of it. ‘Secret Papers’, the most immediately accessible and linear piece, is an odd one: both pompous and lovely. Its first half is the old ‘if a tree falls in a forest’ thing. Only the scenario is, to me at least, overwrought. The trunk of an oak has been “Splayed...into a dozen knotted tongues.” No, scrap that, I like that line a lot. It’s this one (and this one only, on reflection) that makes me wince:

‘[...]would its song,

pure fire and air,
have split the ear?’

It may just be me, but I only vaguely ‘get it’ at the end. Nonetheless, there’s a muscularity crossed with a softness, tenderness, in its imagery.

‘Triage’ is the one I keep coming back to, though I honestly don’t understand it. Not in the way when I read, say, Jorie Graham – when I first read Never I was instantly connected to it, in awe of it, even if it took multiple readings, all a pleasure, to work out what the hell she was talking about. With Batchelor, so far, I feel a little bit pushed out by his density. A little bit put off. Yet still engaged, still curious.

I could spend a lot longer on his poetry, but I’d like to continue reading the rest of the book. But Batchelor is definitely one to come back to. The more one enters his work, goes along with it, the more welcoming it becomes. Though I’ll reserve judgment on whether I actually like it or not.


Kate Bingham


Bingham’s poetry, for the most part, does nothing for me. ‘The Island-designing competition’ is a perfectly lovely and perfectly bland poem about childhood, with emptily signifying vague references to politics (or maybe I’m stretching, to justify bothering to comment on a poem like this – yawn): “They stand in public squares, demanding a recount/as the President mouths his acceptance speech”. ‘The Mouths of Babes’ is more interesting, but still does nothing for me. It is a three poem sequence about the mouths of children at various stages. I’m not really the target market for this kind of thing, but I like to think that a good poem will be a good poem to anyone if it is a good poem. There are some nice lines: “your mouth is the shape/of a single, perfectly accomplished gulp”; and some awkwardly twee ones: “where bi-planes have the high blue hemisphere to themselves/and postmen crunch on broken emeralds”. Simply, weak writing.

There’s another bland lyric (I should just dismiss the bog standard bland lyrics I keep encountering as ABLs from now on. I probably won’t.) before the only of her poems worth reading: ‘De Beers’. Named after the diamond manufacturers, it is a complex poem, multi-faceted, with writing that is strong and striking. It is shocking that this was written by the same poet as the rest, and I advise anyone erring on agreeing with my bitching to read this one before dismissing her outright.


Julia Bird

I’m starting to feel bad about disliking so many of the poets in here. Bird is, for me, boring. Her ‘funny’ poem isn’t funny, and the other two are bland enough to have been written by xyz whoever else.


Patrick Brandon

I like Patrick Brandon’s face. It’s both welcoming and scowling. I can imagine a pleasing tone of haughty annoyance in his voice. As for his poetry, Roddy Lumsden probably describes it best: “strangely confident and confidently strange”. I like them a lot. They are rife with brilliant imagery: “the faded denim of a lung”, a lab coming to “with a flutter of strip lights. A room dreaming of itself”, and, in my favourite of his poems, a glitterball “scattering its hoard of coins”, a canal “lying like a pulled ribbon”, hangover a “muffled aftershock”. His writes slightly off-kilter lyric narratives, imbues the commonplace with an idiosyncratic, imagistic aura, one that surprises the reader and perfectly defamiliarises the normal. I’m not entirely sold by the poems here, but I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up one of his collections soon, and I look forward to getting to know his work better. Definitely one to look in to.


David Briggs

Briggs’ poetry is overtly masculine. It is full of Original Description (“sidle crabwise the sag-sad doorframe”) and lots of hard, terse syllabics, a tad reminiscent of Ted Hughes at times. He writes about leeches “bristling on his bell-end” (not Briggs’ bell-end, I must add) and of “slit-ooze/between toes”. It’s all very solid, very strong, very readable, if a bit sharp. He’s good; he has a controlled voice, one that may not break the mould but is definitely very refined. Again, though, they’re not doing anything exceptional. They’re doing masculine lyrics, doing them well, with some engaging descriptive imagery. I recommend you give him a read. But I wouldn’t rave about his work.

Identity Parade, Part One

In this series of features I plan on writing a little bit about each of the poets on show in Roddy Lumsden's Bloodaxe anthology, Identity Parade, which proclaims in its introduction to be representative of the "pluralism of contemporary British and Irish poetry": plural in "its register", its "regional and ethnic diversity", and plural in "its subject-matter" as well as "in its form and style".


Patience Agbabi

Agbabi’s poetry, while initially interesting, quickly reveals itself to be weak and lacking in depth. Her first piece, ‘The Wife of Bafa’, is a character monologue based on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in which a Nigerian woman recounts to us from a market stall fragments of her life. It is funny, implicitly political and entirely believable. It gave me a warm feeling upon finishing, but I’ve no desire to read it again.

‘Postmod:’ is a snappy but bland lyric. ‘The London Eye’ would probably like to be a witty, light skewering of consumerist London, and is refreshingly playful, any criticism left, as with the politics, implicit. There are some lovely lines: a man “writing/squat words like black cabs in rush hour”; “The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble”. But ultimately it fails to transgress tired metonymy, another London poem in which the city is conveyed simply by listing things that are in it, and I find its chatty, buzzy tone irritatingly, self-consciously ‘contemporary’.

‘Josephine Baker Find Herself’ is the most interesting of the lot, a specular poem in the vein of Julia Copus. So of course, it is impressively structured. It is the voice that bothers me, the persona on show, as well of course as the way Agbabi renders the voice. It yearns to be ‘contemporary’, to be ‘relevant’, and features embarrassing lines like

‘She samples my heartbeat and mixes it with
techno so hardcore it’s spewing out Audis
on acid for fuel.’

I get the impression that hers is the kind of stuff that’d likely help kids at school get into poetry, away from the tedium of Carol Ann Duffy on repeat. Which is an undoubtably good thing. But for me, it does nothing.

Jonathan Asser

I’d not heard of Asser before reading him here. I’m a bit dismayed, prematurely I hope, by the fact this is the second poet in a row, the second poet in the anthology to be writing about London. His first poem, though, is pretty good: there’s an unexpected lightness of touch, a darkness of humour. It is a snapshot of some people in London, ripe with (more) London metonyms which inform the safe epiphany at the end.

‘Something To Do’ is much better – the same sort of thing, this time a list of observations of a microcosm of London in which the speaker aims to “lick each cobble in the mews, to feel/the individual curve against his tongue”. There are some wonderful descriptions and, thankfully, no real conclusion. It perfectly conveys what it wants to convey, but at the end I’m not particularly eager to read again. It’s not Asser’s fault, of course, but I’m sick to death of poems content to be little more than mini-scale representations of London. Tom Chivers in How to Build a City did it brilliantly – the city was the backdrop on which the quality and original composition and thought could commence. Anyway, I digress...

The next poem is the same as above. Observation after observation, some quality imagery, no epiphany. It almost reads like it is observing all the things it needs, the raw materials, to write an exceptional poem, like it is eloquent notes. Am I wrong to be so curtly dismissive of this kind of thing? It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that I find it dull. Yes, there are lots of nice-sounding images one can derive from a big city, yes the humour is engaging, but I want something more probing, something bigger, from the poetry I read.

Tiffany Atkinson

Now this is more like it – Atkinson’s poetry is richly imaginative, perhaps even too richly imaginative.


‘Portrait of the Husband as a Farmer’s Market’ is just that, and a striking, entertaining introduction to her poetry. It is basically just a list of metaphors, and despite their quality, their intensity (or perhaps because of the latter), it doesn’t quite work. Or, more accurately, it is, as I said, just that.

I enjoyed the rest of the poems a lot more. Atkinson is in tune with the recent, ‘innovative’ poetry I like so much (largely American, for some reason), comfortable with its theoretical concerns, appreciative of the artificiality of linguistic reconstruction – almost all of her poems comment on what they are doing. ‘Autobiography Without Pronouns’, for example, does a lot more than its title implies. It portrays the idea of capturing something autobiographically as untrustworthy, not only in its refusal of pronouns but in its filmic imagery: “the sea/for miles on the passenger side/like the hiss of Super-8”. It implies that there is no set self one can truly capture and truly represent linguistically, and that trying to do so in a poem, in this poem, is like trying to record something that is not recordable in the first place. Which is why its end (“And love insists, like gravity”) is such a letdown – it comes from nowhere, seems tacked on and contradictory.

The main fault I have with these poems, the only fault, is that they feel a tiny bit undeveloped. They bombard the reader spectacularly with metaphor, dazzle and impress, but often seem to wear themselves out by their conclusions, like an awkward silence after a big display. As if later work, in which she is more controlled or refined as a writer, is what these pieces are aiming for. Which is why ‘In this one’ stands out. It does the same things as the rest, but the imagery and metaphor never swallow the poem’s intentions. It is beautiful in its tactility and restraint, compared to the others: “His/skin has sun in its unconscious”, “my tongue’s a husband in a dress-/shop”, light hitting earrings “quips back”.

I look forward to her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection in 2011.

Announcement

Over the coming months, we are putting together what we plan on being exhaustive coverage of the best writing being produced at the moment on the various Creative Writing courses in the UK. My own feelings on Creative Writing as a subject are mixed, but it is irrefutable that there is a lot of talent being nourished by these courses, or at the very least a lot of talented writers participating in them, and it is our aim to help promote them and expose their work.

Beginning with UEA (purely for practical reasons: I am Norwich based and doing English & Creative Writing), we are going to hunt down a representative sample of what is being produced by these writers at BA, MA, PhD level and beyond. If you are an undergrad at UEA, on the esteemed MA course, studying for your PhD or would simply like to recommend someone on one of the courses we should look at, don’t hesitate to get in touch at etc.submissions@yahoo.co.uk. Equally, if you're not on the course but are at UEA and interested in submitting, please feel free to do so.

Once we’ve gathered interest we’ll be setting a deadline for entries. Until then, we look forward to hearing from you.


NB. Of course, we're not looking to categorise or tag individual writers as 'UEA' or 'xyz school' writers, merely to help promote good work using an, to an extent, arbitrary backbone of classification. I think the best thing about this endeavor will be the difference, the wild variety of styles being produced, and the impossibility of defining a generic style that can be tagged under the heading of whatever school is being featured.

Pictures of Frozen Water

An Interview With Sam James Hill
by Isabel Lockhart Smith

I think the EP’s title, ‘Pictures of Frozen Water’, is brilliant. How does it relate to the songs? Could we see the songs as the ‘pictures’?

I hope they are pictures. I don’t go overboard on lyrical content in my songs, but I like them to have themes and I like to focus on what I was going into writing it. Because my music is based a lot on repetition, the idea of capturing motives, feelings and ideas and rethinking them is something I’m fond of.

Your music is constituted of many superimposed levels. Do you have a particular process of composition, or does each song materialise in a different way to the last?

I write the phrases of a song before I write the song. Usually those emerge by accident when I’m playing around with effects or rhythms or looping things in different moods and then I ram them into ways or working into each other, or build them on and on each other. Sometimes it was difficult trying to take the phrases apart in the studio to record them. Sorry, did I type studio? I meant tiny cupboard under the stairs.

The sound is really clean, despite these many levels. Has the EP been a long time in the making?

22 YEARS IN THE MAKING!! Well, about nine months. I’m very happy with how it sounds- Alex Carson (Barefeet Records/Musician/piano teacher/social butterfly) did a great job. We did it all in bedrooms with basic equipment, but he’s got a lot of recording knowledge and a good musical ear and had some great ideas. We had to do it slowly- we both had erratic amounts of time, and I was terribly annoying and kept changing the songs I wanted on the record, writing new ones or changing the ones I already had.

Having seen you live quite a few times in the past year, I was wondering whether your songs underwent any significant changes in the transition between performance and recorded material?

We tried to keep things as close as possible to how they were played live, but it did give us leeway to make some subtle changes and some crazier-than-Mariah-Carey stuff. We affected my voice quite a lot to give it a bit of a choral, odd timed feel and thickened out some of the bits I can’t do live- drums, effects. Even when Lydia Walker (from Tawny Owl and the Birds of Prey) is around to play bass live, everything is limited to what the drum machine or loop pedal can do at the time, so it’s nice to expand outside those restrictions. However, we tried to stay within the realms of what could be realistically done, just because that’s how I work out stuff. That said, there is one song- the title track- that’s fully created on a laptop using re-samples of the other tracks- specifically Reminiscence- and shares some of the same lyrics, but can’t really be played live without pressing play on a laptop. It’s meant to be a hazy looking back at looking back, or summit.

Do you find certain themes reappear in your lyrics?

Memories, parties, people, books, pie, cheap poetry, things I studied in my degree, other music, feeling guilty for no apparent reason.

So are lyrics important to you? Or does the music always come first?

My lyrics are vague and not great, but I know what I mean and they’re important to me writing a song.

Who or what influences you?

Soundtracks that change the tone of a film. It’s a really odd sensation when you hear different to what you see.

Van Der Graff Generator (the band, not the electric equipment).

Jon Martyn - he played folk guitar music through a rack-mounted delay system in the 70’s and it sounded rad. I remember catching video of him late night on tv and it was amazing.

I like Mogwai, Four Tet and The Books.

The modern music scene loves to impose genres, subgenres and movements. Please, if you can, define your music for us. A safe little sound bite will do nicely.

Experimental folk(tronic) post-rock?

Perfect.

You quite deftly reconcile the mandolin with the loop pedal. Is it fair to say that you are interested in incorporating ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of music-making? And if so, what do you think is achieved by this?

I’m not sure. I think any and all music that is created today is a reconciliation of old and new. Anyone who cites a previous musician as an influence or had a teacher is incorporating something that has been done before with something else.

Finally, Norwich is in the running for UK ‘City of Culture’. Any other Norwich artists, musical and non-musical, you want to plug (in a bid to up the East Anglian cultural ante)?

Rory McVicar
Space Metaliser
Milly Hirst
Bearsuit (New album soon!)
Lady Panther
Mat Riviere
Follow Your Heart
The Middle Ones
Alex Carson
Tawny Owl and the Birds of Prey (although this is a cheat, as I am a Bird of Prey)
Royal McBee
Horses Brawl
Alto 45 (Album soon!)
Fever Fever
Transept
Alloy Ark
Shane Olinski
King Laconic (new EP soon!)

Sometimes I just have a gander at NUCA’s exhibits and realise exactly how good the art is there.
Ditto with UEA’s creative writing students.
Poetry by Adam Warne is pretty sweet. Also, Sam Riviere and Jack Underwood have Faber and Faber poetry pamphlets published, as well as both being in brilliant bands.

The UK’s only music video festival (28th June – 10th July).

If that’s not good enough for a city of culture then I don’t know what is. Although I think the likelihood of Norwich becoming said city is very unlikely. Be nice though, wouldn’t it?
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Review of Sam James Hill's Pictures of Frozen Water
by Joshua Jones

Norwich-based musician Sam James Hill’s debut EP, Pictures of Frozen Water, is damn near perfect. Which is not to be hyperbolic – it is flawed in parts, though minorly; and these small flaws only serve to heighten the EP’s charm and promise. In short, it is 25 minutes of icily beautiful pop music.

It is the kind of music that is a pleasure to describe. Its influences are many, all apparent enough and somehow all capitalised on, and, to an extent at least, transcended. It brings to mind, often all at once, The Postal Service and The Notwist, Ulrich Schnauss’s A strangely isolated place, Loveless’s less guitar-heavy tracks, Patrick Wolf circa Lycanthropy, The Age of Rockets, Fennesz, Four Tet...the list could go on. While he isn’t necessarily doing anything radically different from bands like the above, Hill has managed to incorporate his influences astutely and to create something of his own, cherrypicking some of their best features and filtering them through his own sound without ever coming off as redolent.

One of the reasons it works so well, one of the reasons I perhaps misleadingly termed it perfect, is that it really should be taken as a whole. It is meticulously sequenced, each track segueing completely naturally into the next, furthering the sound, exploring itself from within itself, from the base of a very assured and complete palette. All the pieces matter, and it is well aware of how best to serve each individual piece. So I should rephrase myself: it is a perfect example and a perfect rendition of what it is and what it wants to be.

The only organic instruments I can detect are mandolin and bass, both effected wonderfully, never losing any of their human qualities amid the bed of electronics. Actually, bed is probably the wrong word to use here – the electronic element of the EP is its soil, the wash of sound from which the looping mandolin and bass parts expand and thrive, interlacing and growing over the course of the individual songs but never leaving or losing the core. The vocals hang and dissolve and return over and under everything, lyrics less important than the tone. The various riffs and phrases loop and circle, changed by superimposition but still there.

‘Reminiscence’ is my favourite track, at least for the moment. It is the longest of the six, and seems to embody everything that the EP is doing. It opens with echoing rimshots and what sounds like Orb-esque electronic keys, slowly growing, vocals washed out as if coming from somewhere other, filtering from channel to channel in search of whatever or whoever it was that prompted the statement “Some things change.” There is a bridge of sorts; for just a few seconds one wonders where the song is going to go next, as if after all this build up it’ll simply return to where it was, until all of a sudden it begins to swell, distorted mandolin burning its way through the production as the vocals dissolve into swathes of sound, only to eventually, at the end of the song, when everything has winded down, play unadulterated on their own for just a few seconds. It is a fleeting, masterful piece of production, the perfect resolution to all the song’s circular searching, returning to a source that wasn’t overtly there in the first place, sounding like a beginning as much as an end.

The rest of the tracks all work similarly, and none of them are weak. The first two are the most immediately striking, the two in the middle content to maintain the pace before the more condensed closing two. The only real flaw to my ears is that ‘Alfred’s Last Gasp’ speeds by too quickly, loses some of the impact it would and could have contained if it just hadn’t rushed through itself. But even that is hardly piercing criticism.

It is one of the most satisfying debut releases I’ve heard for some time, one that holds so much promise and potential for a longer work but is, at the same time, more than enough for now. A multi-faceted, multi-purpose record that deserves exposure and, especially considering its very reasonable price tag, deserves to be bought and consumed unsparingly.
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You can purchase Pictures of Frozen Water here for just £3. It is released on lovely independent label called Bare Feet Records, which in the coming month we will be featuring, as well as reviewing some of their new records, for the simple reason that they are putting out shockingly good music that I hope we can help reach the wider audience the artists involved deserve.

Voice Recognition, Part One

I will be going through the poets in Voice Recognition in chronological order, three by three, in the most part for practical purposes, before looking back over them as a whole at the end. The first trio consists of: Jay Bernard (b. 1988), Emily Berry (b. 1981) and Amy Blakemore (b. 1991).

Unsurprisingly, Berry’s is probably the most comfortable, the most effortless of the three, and she’s by far my favourite, though not without her flaws. She has mastered a completely unself-conscious colloquial register, and it is instantly likeable and immediately engaging. Her best poems, all of which deploy it, I will label ‘postcard poetry’, which is not the insult it may initially seem. They are address poems, deliberate yet conversational in tone. The first of these is the most literally postcardesque: ‘I ♥ NY’. It is fittingly reminiscent of O’Hara in Lunch Poems, a walkabout of mundane detail, addressed to one of the people the narrator spent time with in New York, excited and excitable. It makes no judgments. There’s no real point to it, as far as I can tell, beyond conveying the kind of frantic energy the narrator felt in the city, and the excitement and energy are perfectly reflected by the poem’s form and diction. At one point the Hudson is described as cracking up “so gorgeously” (27), and it is testament to Berry’s ability that this doesn’t jar. The imagery is controlled, mostly observational, tangibly descriptive rather than grandiose in order to reflect the immediacy of the observations, the ceaseless pace of city stimuli. The strongest image in the piece, wryly placed next to that Hudson description, shows her to be restrained enough in her lyricism to stray away from melodrama: “the clouds seemed to send down/light like spaceships marking where to land.” She even manages to insert meta elements, masking (and functioning) as social comment: “You can buy non-sequiturs in bundles now/from international supermarkets. And guilt,/where is that sold?” (28). In a poem largely made up of non-sequiturs.

Elsewhere, though, this self-referential awareness is lacking. ‘The Incredible History of Patient M.’ and ‘My Perpendicular Daughter’, while utterly enjoyable, are derivative of the post-Luke Kennard school of absurd, ironic, jeu poems that have swamped pretty much every journal since Kennard’s brilliant The Harbour Beyond The Movie. Bastard ruined it for the rest of us. Still, the latter Berry piece includes this: “I asked for milk/and tipped its long white screech right down” (30).

‘What I Did On My Summer Holidays’ succeeds due to its visceral, subtle shift from ‘I’ to ‘She’ as the poem’s narrator addresses her father’s suicide, skipping from lost child to an older and more detached, isolated narration . And ‘Questions I Wanted to Ask You in the Swimming Pool’ creates an affecting and unique extended metaphor from the titular pool: “how many times did we drift together, tired,/regret tautening over the bones of us the way skin does as it dries” (29).

It is through her refined colloquial style and inspired use of the second-person that her writing stands out and allows tried and tested themes and ideas to be freshly explored. However, and if such a thing is quantifiable, the objective best piece in her sequence is ‘A Short Guide to Corseting’. While on the surface, like ‘...Swimming Pool’ and so many other contemporary poems, it simply takes an individual metaphor and extends it, it also embodies so much of what is good about her writing at the same times as differing from the rest. Love comes “sideways, like a crab” (30). The narrator wants “to agree with love...to be carried off in its claws”, and the poem conveys humour at the same time as intense claustrophobia as the narrator crafts the smallest possible life, the most edited and honed one she can. “I’ve realised how little we need” (31). Whether we are supposed to agree with this or not is left ambiguous.

Bernard and Blakemore are for the most part far less developed. There are numerous shoddy line breaks that simply infuriate, the beginning of Bernard’s ‘Eight’ being a prime example. While both of their selections are clearly decent, promising even, I can’t help but yearn for something more refined and controlled. Blakemore, for instance, tries on a number of voices, and the furthest she gets from herself the greater they fail. ‘Making Money’ , for example, sounds artificial. There is no detectable voice attributable to the poet beyond a similar phrasing to the rest of her poems, and yet no believable representation of “the perplexing republic of drunken city traders” (36). It’s finely written enough, but it’s a transitional piece, an individual’s experiment in writing, part of the process of discovering one’s own voice and prevailing themes. Which is fine, just not what I’d expect to be offered by a leading collection of the “best young poets” of the day. She has more success elsewhere, though. ‘The Guests’ is an affectionate and convincing portrayal of childhood, “squint[ing] at guests”, wanting to know “who these strangers are” (34). ‘Achievement’, while not exactly a masterpiece, is probably the most enjoyable of her poems. It is believable and unaffected, a love poem of sorts that accepts and makes use of its limitations. The ‘you’ of the poem is “a God”, the “only thing” the narrator has “achieved in school”, and it quite beautifully conveys teenage longing without making the melodrama seem melodramatic. There is cynicism as N surveys the end of year celebrations: “This is a precursor to our future Christmas office parties” (35), and it is this dry narration, coupled with the kind expressions quoted above, that make the poem convincing.

Many of the same flaws can be carried over to Bernard. They too often read like transitional pieces, steps towards what she will eventually create. However, her opening poem, ‘Cadence’, is magnificent. Sure, there are lines and phrasings that could have been tightened just a tad, but it doesn’t really matter. The poem deconstructs contemporary black identity, but its simultaneous acceptance of the past and disregarding of it is universal. It is a powerful and convincing argument for oneself and one’s subjectivity:

‘Being young is an oxymoron –
are genes are old and as gnarled as the moon.
They are genes only: we’re columns of blood biding time,
caught by the delicate cadence that binds us, yes,
but that doesn’t mean I owe a thing to you.’

Equally, it describes perfectly the kind of attitude all aspiring young writers should have going forward: the awareness of the importance of all that has preceded, and the confidence to move on. It is by far my favourite poem so far in the anthology, the perfect place from which to begin reading and the perfect place to end this review.

Voice Recognition, Preamble

Whatever you think about it, it can’t be denied that Voice Recognition, published last year by the mighty Bloodaxe, is a good thing. That such a big (in poetry terms at least) press is not only publishing but actively celebrating the work of young (in some cases 17/18-year-old) poets is welcome evidence of the recent surge in popularity of poetry. The problem, of course, is that any attempt to compile “21 of the best young poets who have yet to publish a full collection” (10) is going to be controversial. There are so many talented young writers nowadays – any cursory perusal of the average journal will prove this. Equally, there are many average writers benefitting from the explosion of credible outlets showcasing new work. Any attempt to comprehensively collect ‘the best’ of them is in a sense doomed to fail: surely there are more than 21 young poets worthy of this level of attention. Some of the risks inherent in trying to do so are well-expressed in editors James Byrne’s and Clare Pollard’s succinct, if general, introduction: they wisely sought to avoid the “MA conveyor-belt”, the poets who conform “to archetypes of academic orderliness” (12). Nonetheless, and not wanting to criticise either institution unfoundedly, there is an undeniable Foyle Young Poet/Oxbridge bias in this collection. Again, the existence of the former regardless of your feelings about it is an irrefutable positive; I merely wish to point out the correlation between the two without probing it uneducatedly.

Pollard’s and Byrne’s intentions are admirable: to transcend the “mere recounting of anecdotes or minor stagings of epiphany” (13) and find the poets who escape “’general themes’ and [address] the particularity of being alive now...21st Century voices” (14). I can’t help feeling Scrooge-like expressing my caution at such an aim. I agree with it, completely; but there is undoubtedly a danger, as there is in all academic and critical discourses, of ignoring the quality of the work in and of itself in favour of ‘big themes’, desperately seeking to define the age, (re)construct and re-present the contemporary world, ignoring the danger of losing sight of the text itself in overplaying that which supposedly tackles ‘issues’ and ‘the now’. And whilst they rightly seek writers unafraid to take risks, explore as many voices as possible, I’d point out the obvious: that risk-taking and quality are not synonymous. I’d rather read a poet’s more refined work when they’re not as fresh and shiny and young than the exploratory attempts they made reaching said refinement – unless, of course, there is beauty in the flaws. There is a pervasive urge these days to get your poems published as soon as possible, preferably before turning 35, so you can be tagged a bright new thing, an urge that is both desirable and damaging.

Anyway, with angst thankfully aside and disclaimer begrudgingly made, I will over the next few weeks delve into the collection itself and offer some thoughts on and analyses of these 21 promising poets.