kultur for sale

What to say about this book? It began life at the National Poetry Library as the Endangered Poetry Project , has taken around 18 months of research, and has brought be into contact with some of the most exciting and unique poets and poetries imaginable. A highlight was in discovering a poem in  Patuá,  the critically endangered patois spoken by people on the island of Macau, near to Hong Kong.   I had read on the language database Ethnologue that the language was ‘nearly extinct’. A helpful and knowledgeable academic, who was also a prolific and thorough anthologist of Macanese writers living in Macau, told me that he’d heard carol services sung in Patuá, but had never come across any new poetry  that had been created in the language. Another academic,  John Corbett, who had hosted my visit to Macau a few years before, had also drawn a blank, but suggested I try Miguel  S. Fernandes, a lawyer and local theatre director. A few days later Fernandes’s re...

There are so many exciting and subversive moments in  Ambit 's sixty year history: Ballard's fake adverts on 'innner space', Paolozzi's 'visual literature', pastiches of mass media, fusions of high and low culture and the drive to create in the face of public 'taste'. The magazine has also included two of my favourite authors, B.S. Johnson and early work by American poet Alice Notley. And like Peter Finch's Second Aeon , this is also a magazine that published visual poetry, with the iconic cover of issue 36 inviting readers to create their own poem from the different elements: At the Bluecoat event on Wednesday, Ambit editor Briony Bax did a great job of presenting archival texts, including letters from formative editor Martin Bax, between the readings by Tony Dash, Brian Wake and Jennifer Lee-Tsai (amazingly give that all four of us are poets from Liverpool, this was the first time I'd met them). It was a particular joy to hear about ...

In the first half of the year I wrote a new sequence (which I'm adding to, slowly) called 'Threnody of Radiation'. It's a lyric elegy for recursive depression, a love song, a hymn to Robert Desnos and a homage to Mark E. Smith. I'm delighted that parts 1, 3 and 8 are in the latest Poetry Review . Here's one of the missing pieces, section 4. Farewell Europe. This threnody Threnody Through the cloister of the underground In the clasp of the commuter rush I think of you in threnody of terror Scanning the faces of thousands for a trace of fear Crossy Road     Android poker     Emails on property St Pancras foyers the free world of Europe I hold the explosive of Desnos If this weight was a brick it wouldn’t make clearance Desnos committed to the deep image In trance states       Dreams        Under drink Lover, if you suffer pain, never fear the river Seine The station’s forecourts & throughways Cleanse...

Toni Morrison said she wrote her first novel because she wanted to read it. With Dedalus , my first novel, I wrote it because I'd read Ulysses so many times. It might have been unhealthy to read Joyce's all-consuming magnum opus for what may have been the tenth time. I bought my first copy of Ulysses when I was seventeen (I now have three). It has lived next to my bed where I should keep my medication. It's spine is fluffing up like the back of a pigeon. From my first reading I've revisited this book so many times the Dublin it depicts has become more familiar than the road I live in. In 2014 I thought that rather than reading the book again I'd write a novel in response, set the day after, on 17th June 1904. That might just get it out of my system. Four years later and the book has been published by Henningham Family Press in a lovely edition. Cover of Dedalus , Henningham Family Press 2018 But writing any novel is always a work of obsession in itself, a...

T HE P OETS OF L IVERPOOL A port city only cares for two things : commerce & the avant-garde. Cobwebs. Wet cobbles. The poets leave the Tate & crowd into the Baltic Fleet. For their words the mermaids part their fins. The Irish left behind some ballads and the ship owners have drowned themselves. The poets put a pound in the head of a Baptist and words chrism its tongue with red beads. All the trainee corporates are in the barbershops paying for the privilege to talk property and not have their necks cut for it. At that point we move to the Belvedere. Did you ever meet a poet who’d trained as a barber? The ones who forget that language stems from the umbel of ideas are already drunk and wringing out the taxis. The poets aren’t even qualified to be poets but listen, they have a few ideas of their own, holding the timekeeper in a headlock, starting the night again at Last Orders. Loose coins spawn the floor of each bar and cruis...

I still remember the first time I heard Captain Beefheart's music: the words ran like paint and stuck to parts of my brain I didn't know I had. In 2015 I discovered that Beefheart had first shown his visual art at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. I approached Bryan Biggs, the Artistic Director, who was well aware of this history (and a huge Beefheart fan), so along with independent curator Kyle Percy we began to hatch a plan to put on a Captain Beefheart weekend. We had two aims: to show the links between Beefheart and Liverpool and to explore Beefheart as a Total Artist, moving seamlessly between art forms and defying the borders between them. My job was to focus specifically on Captain Beefheart / Don Van Vliet the poet. I organised a panel discussion with poets Patricia Farrell, Peter Finch and Sarah Crewe, who all selected a Van Vliet poem and shared and discussed this for the audience (you can read some of Van Vliet's poems here:  http://www.beefheart.com/category/life-dvv...

Here's a new visual poem, a mutual homage to Eugen Gomringer and Pink Floyd....