Poetry Publishers and their Mortgages

The poetry world often displays an implicit ambivalence around publishing: it would consider poetry to be above the petty concerns of money whilst simultaneously bewailing the fact that no one will pay for it. Whilst poets continue to see traditional publication as the only legitimation of their work they will continue to willingly ignore that publishing is capitalism and little else, and we will continue to blunder about in our strange relationship with the literary culture industry. (Blackwell’s Oxford shop recently tweeted “Buy book. Read book. Feel good. Repeat.”, which would be considerably more unsettling if referring to, say, bubble bath or toasters.) Publishers, who otherwise exist (as publishers) entirely in the logic of capitalism, would frame their lack of sales as a symptom of a cultural decline. And poets, who otherwise exist precariously outside the logic of capitalism, seem unwilling to disseminate their work any other way.

This isn’t to say that publishers are Bad or capitalism is Bad; this is not necessarily to portray all poetry publishers as Harold Skimpole; this is to say that a lot of the attitudes which have reappeared following the news of the end of Salt’s single author collections are weird.

Review of Diane Marie’s ‘i wrote a poem dedicated to god that i considered extremely disrespectful’

I have a review of Diane Marie‘s i wrote a poem dedicated to god that i considered extremely disrespectful on Sabotage today. I saw her read from it in Oxford recently, as well as an ebook based on Brand New lyrics called OK I BELIEVE YOU, ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DIE which is also rather good.

In other news, a review of Morgan Harlow’s Midwest Ritual Burning and Anne Stevenson’s Astonishment has gone to appear in the next issue of Under the Radar.

Sadcore Dadwave: Albion Beatnik, Oxford

I went to the Albion Beatnik in Oxford on Wednesday night for Sadcore Dadwave and heard poems by:  Sian S Rathore, Diane Marie, Paul Askew, Emily Harrison and Luke Kennard, then Dan Holloway, Lucy Ayrton, Joe Briggs, someone whose name I regretfully forget, and a chap called Lysander, and someone called Molly. In honesty it was mostly Luke Kennard who I wanted to hear but the others were entertaining. I’ve only ever been to the Albion Beatnik for music before (or, you know, books), but it’s a great venue.

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Review in Under the Radar 10: Roy Marshall’s Gopagilla, Aly Stoneman’s Lost Lands, Richie McCaffery’s Spinning Plates Niall Campbell’s After the Creel Fleet

(This first appeared in Under the Radar issue 10.)

Poems are discontent; poems fidget, as they are uncertain and dissatisfied with where they are or what they are up to or what they’d like to tell you about it. Any poem which professes certainty, or the ability to express itself clearly, is a liar. I think this is the most important thing to keep in mind, especially when reading new poets. (Older poets have their own forms of tiredness.) It is how poets deal with their familiar and their unfamiliar spaces that create poems which the reader can get involved in, and this is something I would like to explore.

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Review in Under the Radar 9: Caleb Klaces’ All Safe All Well, Kirsten Irving’s What to Do, Adrian Buckner’s Bed Time Reading

(This first appeared in Under the Radar issue 9.)

Whilst I watch the clouds come along on fronts, I can’t decide whether to say that emotion lives on the edge of thought or that thought lives on the edge of emotion, but either way all poetry is closely involved with this problem. The three pamphlets which I have been reading contain poems that it is interesting to think of as responses, whether their speakers are responding to a book, the sight of their lover with someone else, or the death of a cloned ibex. How we in turn then respond is perhaps too complicated, but it is enough to say that we as readers are closely attuned to these responses, as we are, in some way, taking part in the same action, feeling the same pressures of thought and emotion. To dramatise and direct these pressures is no easy business, and it is interesting to see how Caleb Klaces, Kirsten Irving and Adrian Buckner, in their different ways, attempt it.

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Representations in Skyfall

  • Skyfall as a film about British national identity and the empire. (The bulldog.)
  • Skyfall as a frank assumption of the implications of the Daniel Craig reboot of the Bondverse: the acceptance of something like third-order simulacra: the Bondverse rejecting the burden of representation of the ‘real’ world for representation of the Bondverse.
  • The Aston Martin as the symbol of this assumption.
  • M as the main character.
  • The ‘Skyfall’ manor as James Bond’s ‘unresolved childhood trauma’ (he “always hated this place”); the ‘Skyfall’ manor as Balmoral; the ‘Skyfall’ manor as imperial guilt. (Silva was handed over, or betrayed, with Hong Kong.)
  • Scotland (but only here, for its other symbolic richness) as Bondverse, as “back in time”.
  • Skyfall as a defense of Baddies. Baddies as a legitimate mythologising of terror in the post-9/11 world. Skyfall as a rejection of complex fears. Skyfall as an admission that in the ‘real’ world the threat is too much (fight it in Scotland instead).
  • M as the Queen; Skyfall as a rehearsal for her death.
  • The Olympics Opening Ceremony is important for a lot of this. (i.e., parachuting Queen and UK’s ‘post-imperial’ acceptance.)
  • China as a rehabilitated location: China as more modern than the west, blue lighting, the “brave new world”, as Bond says before it cuts to Shanghai. (The security guard confronts the assassin, rather than confronting Bond.)

Also, what is this trope of the captured nemesis who, we later discover, wanted to be captured.