Sunday 31 March 2013

I Trust I Can Rely On Your Vote



Radiohead performing the brilliant "Electioneering", shortly after the release of their album, OK Computer.

Saturday 30 March 2013

The Salt Book of Younger Poets



THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough

Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99




The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.




Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens | Sarah Howe | Andrew Jamison | Annie Katchinska | Andrew McMillan | Siofra McSherry | Ben Maier | Laura Marsh | Annabella Massey | James Midgley | Helen Mort | Charlotte Newman | Richard O’Brien | Richard Osmond | Vidyan Ravinthiran | Sophie Robinson | Charlotte Runcie | Ashna Sarkar | William Searle | Colette Sensier | Warsan Shire | Lavinia Singer | Adham Smart | Martha Sprackland | Eloise Stonborough | Emily Tesh | Jack Underwood | Ahren Warner | Ben Wilkinson | Sophie Yeo




Available to pre-order from Amazon.


Friday 29 March 2013

Review: Andrew Jamison's Happy Hour


Andrew Jamison’s debut collection, Happy Hour, is preoccupied with the towering themes of time and money, but the deceptions of “the clock on the wall” are a particular concern. Unable to buy into the world view of “The Starlings” where “a tick” is simply “a tick, a tock a tock, time time”, time and again the poet witnesses “obliterations of the commonplace”, whether in the form of optical illusion (a cinema’s “ocean / of curtained wall” recalled from childhood), “the strange behaviour of unnameable birds”, or the way that “nothing / comes but every way that nothing can”. Jamison knows that, however we spend our time, time spends us: the book’s title speaks of the fleeting nature of happiness and our clumsy pursuit of it, but also hints at the energetic, demotic, wistful yet upbeat tones the poems strike. Here is a poet with “disappointment deep / in the mayonnaise of my chicken sandwich”, but one who quickly catches himself out, exposing the artifice when
disappointment and nostalgia spray-paint themselves
onto this journey home.
Happy Hour is dominated by two types of poem: the intense vignette that takes a moment – the “after after-dinner” of a summer’s evening, or the confusion of shoppers in “Winter Clearance” – to plumb our modern lives for sense and significance; and a swiftly discursive, often longer single sentence piece that strings clauses together with half-rhymes and pulsing rhythms. The best – and indeed longest – of these, “Thinking About the Point of Things”, is a tour de force of personal, public and political dimensions, jumping from “placards of touched-up, / photoshopped, yet puffy, pasty-faced politicians”, through the redolent image of the garden’s “faded Gilbert rugby ball” and midges like “a swarm of small sun-gods” before arriving at a single robin, embodying a strange truth at the poem’s core. Elsewhere, a series of candid reflections take in a first trip to New York, in which Jamison’s eye for the telling detail and sense of humour meet head-on. A few of the book’s shortest pieces are probably too slight, indulging in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. While Happy Hour owes some obvious debts – Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage – it is an entertaining, enjoyable first collection that should attract admirers.



first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Matter Launch

Matter magazine, published out of the MA Writing course at Sheffield Hallam University, is now in its tenth year and, to celebrate, this year's issue - just published - has a burnt gold cover. As ever, it's a stunning object to hold in hand and, like the best literature mags, combines quality production with excellent writing.

I've only dipped into the issue myself, having recently received a copy, but have already been struck by the guest contributions - from the likes of Daljit Nagra and Iain Sinclair - and the strength of writing from MA students included. (Jamie Coward's 'The Coxcomb' is a nifty little poem in particular; curious, amusing, subtly musical.) As in previous years, the issue points to Sheffield Hallam's ever-growing reputation as a place that nurtures some of the best new writers: Katharine Towers, Marina Lewycka, Tony Williams and Frances Leviston, to name but a few successful alumni.

Should you fancy getting hold of a copy of this year's issue, then, you'll find it on sale from the Matter website, as well as in Sheffield bookshops. And there's a couple of events tied in with it too, where contributors to the issue will read from their work and copies will be on sale. The first is the launch proper, at the Sheffield Hallam Blackwell's branch on Wednesday 13th October, from 7.15pm. Refreshments will be provided. There's also an event at the Riverside in Sheffield on the 21st October at 7pm. This will feature many of the same readers, but they'll be reading more of their work. I'm also told that the London launch is on 4th November at London Review Bookshop from 7pm.

You can find out more about these events, among other things, on the Matter website.

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Lily Allen Shocks Glastonbury Crowds Dressed As Hyperactive Girl From Hit Children's TV Series Lazy Town


Above (left): Lily Allen pictured with guitarist and bassist at this year's Glastonbury Festival
Above (right): Lazy Town star Stephanie sporting her trademark garish hair

Monday 25 March 2013

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Saturday 23 March 2013

Michael Hofmann


Just a bit of news in the form of my critical perspective of Anglo-German Faber poet Michael Hofmann's work going up on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, here.

Later in the week, I'll hopefully find time to do a write-up of the music and poetry goings-on at Latitude Festival (see post below).

Thursday 21 March 2013

The Bends: Radiohead



The title track from Radiohead's second album, and the first that proved them to be a band of serious ambition and original talent. Performed live on Jools Holland's Later... there's also an excellent performance of 'High and Dry' that YouTube offers up afterwards.

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Latitude 2009

Well, it's that time of year again... When those festival goers with exceptional taste head out to the Suffolk countryside to enjoy three days of great music, poetry, literature, cabaret, film and comedy at the wonderful, indefatigable Latitude festival.

Sadly though, I won't be attending this year, and am particularly gutted as the line-up for the Poetry Arena looks at least as strong - if not stronger - than when I was reviewing and blogging on the festival last year and the year before. Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage, Kathyrn Simmonds, Helen Mort, Caroline Bird, Emily Berry, Andrew Motion, Paul Farley - Latitude attracts some serious poetic talent, and unsurprisingly the tent's audience often spills into the sunshine outside: Armitage was particularly popular on both the Poetry and Literary stages last year, and Daljit Nagra drew a big, midday crowd.

This year, there's also music from the likes of The Pet Shop Boys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Regina Spektor, Patrick Wolf, Bat for Lashes, Editors, Gossip and Spiritualised, and comedy from Stephen K. Amos, Dave Gorman, Rufus Hound, Jo Brand, Lee Mack, Marcus Brigstocke and Ed Byrne.

As I say, I'm gutted I'm not going. Maybe next year...

Friday 15 March 2013

Lament



Lament



Here now, it’s hard to believe this place –
yellowed wallpaper, towels hung over
every decent lager except the guest –
is where we first met and that blur

of brilliance – a world from this pint
and the torn fabric of a duff pool table –
meant the next week, the next fortnight,
were the closest things ever get to simple.

So if this is how I know us, want us –
the two who clicked on an understanding
of close as close to sparseness, bluntness –
then that’s why, aware or drifting,

I’ve come to sit in this selfsame chair,
selfsame spot; listening to the traffic
which you must be a part of, somewhere,
pitched as it is among frantic and Orphic

while one by one the pigeons flutter off;
draining the glass and closing my book
as the lights click on, someone coughs,
and the place is good as lost, however I look.



Ben Wilkinson

Thursday 14 March 2013

Review: Paul Henry's The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems


As the poet-critic Nick Laird recently pointed out in a review of the poet’s letters, the influence of Louis MacNeice is everywhere in contemporary poetry. His sprightly, masterly way with form and his sprawling themes – the blurring of past and present, personal and public, darkness and light – have made an impact on some of the best-known British and Irish poets currently writing. Paul Henry may be an unfamiliar name to some, but like the work of many of his better-known contemporaries, The Brittle Sea, his new and selected poems, owes much to the Belfast-born “laureate of in-between-ness”. This hefty volume takes in twenty-odd years’ worth of work, selections from five collections and a batch of new poems, yet like an intricate Venn diagram, all are linked by their abiding themes: how the past haunts the present, and how people and places change, as do our relationships with them.

Despite their MacNeice-ish content and formal bent, however, stylistically Henry’s poems are often expressionistic, even symbolist. Early pieces such as “Double Act” and “Love Birds” – both about couples making the most of the hand that life has dealt them – combine suggestive images and wordplay with short lines, oblique clauses and a subtle music. In the more reflective, avowedly lyrical poems, this restraint and exactitude remain, serving to reign in sentiment and keep self-indulgence in check. “The Visitors”, a sequence from Henry’s third collection, The Milk Thief, conjures female relatives from the poet’s childhood with eerie concision, while “Between Two Bridges”, in which the poet stalks his younger self around a changing city, employs a similar matter-of-factness:
Wind scales the river in its mud.
It squirms and pirouettes to the tide’s score –
dance of a reptile, forging its cast in silt.

Here comes a friendly stray, with marble eyes.
And here, someone’s ditched a fridge. Boats
ghost-boats, Anon’s boarded up work …
The effect can be gripping, but Henry can go too far in his attempt to avoid solipsism: cloaking personal intimations in a wilful mysteriousness that leaves the reader behind. It is the new, previously uncollected poems that best strike a balance between the emotive and the clinical, often with formal skill and time and space-bending panache to boot. Here, a “gap between the railings” becomes “thirty-five years” and a meeting room sprouts wheels, sending us “through tunnel after tunnel”: the imaginative leaps justified, the emotional reach profound. They represent the best work of a lyric poet who deserves a wider readership.



first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Wednesday 13 March 2013

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Monday 11 March 2013

Young British Poets in The Manhattan Review

An interesting, varied and substantial biannual publication, The Manhattan Review has long been featuring exciting work by leading American, British and international poets alike, from John Burnside to D Nurkse, Pascale Petit to Les Murray, Ruth Fainlight to David Constantine, George Szirtes to Penelope Shuttle, and of course the late, great Peter Redgrove, who remained a regular contributor until his passing.

But of special interest in the latest issue, as well as work by Tim Liardet, John Kinsella, Polish poet Julia Hartwig and a number of those listed above, is an important feature – something of a welcome, occasional aspect of the publication, taking stock of trends and developments in contemporary poetry across the globe – in this instance, ‘Seventeen Young British Poets’, edited and introduced by Todd Swift.

As a successful editor – having put together Poetry Nation and 101 Poets Against the War, both of which featured a broad, eclectic sweep of established and emerging poets, as well as the Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam recordings – Swift’s selection is a thoughtful one, and his understanding of British poetry as a partial outsider (a Canadian living in London, both British and North American influences are much in evidence in his own poetic sensibility and attitudes) makes his introduction and its justifications an intelligently written and largely convincing read. The seventeen poets featured, then, are a selection of those which both Swift and co-selector Philip Fried (longstanding editor of The Manhattan Review) suggest are currently most successfully drawing from, developing upon, and in rich conversation with the complex poetic ‘schools’ that precede them, most obviously the British lyric tradition (whose current talented practitioners, as Swift notes, include Sean O’Brien, Don Paterson, Roddy Lumsden, George Szirtes, and Hugo Williams) and the more modernist-influenced British avant-garde, whose linguistically interrogative approach is perhaps best exemplified in the work of J.H. Prynne.

Though bold and, as with all such predictions, less than certain, then, the central claim to the selection is not an unreasonable one: that ‘every one of these poets would likely be found on a list of the thirty most impressive, or original, new younger writers to start publishing in the 21st century’. So who are these poets? They range from the lyrically gifted Jacob Polley to the linguistically dextrous Daljit Nagra, and span from recent Eric Gregory Award winners and other emerging voices to those whose recent prize-winning books are slowly helping to reshape, develop and evolve British poetry today. Among them are the playfully inventive wit of Luke Kennard, the quirky and fresh lyricism of Emily Berry, and the markedly contemporary suburban tales of Kathryn Simmonds. They are seventeen poets at varying stages of their still collectively early development as writers, and this feature gives a taste of their early output with two new poems by each, something which, to The Manhattan Review’s great credit, few other magazines have the space or ambition for (also worth mentioning are its regularly featured lengthy essays on contemporary poetry, as in the current issue’s ‘Smuggled Under the Threshold of Listening: Encountering Alice Oswald’).

It’s well worth picking up a copy of the Fall/Winter 2008/9 edition, then, which can be ordered from the magazine’s website here, not only for the important and interesting Young British Poets feature itself, but to sample the poems, essays and translations of a publication worth subscribing to.

Saturday 9 March 2013

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Friday 8 March 2013

Mick Imlah: The Lost Leader


His first collection of poems in twenty years (since the acclaimed Birthmarks in 1988), and Mick Imlah's new Faber volume, The Lost Leader, is sure to be one of the most significant poetry books published this year. In this weekend's Guardian, Peter McDonald reviews it.

Thursday 7 March 2013

Review: Colette Bryce's Self-Portrait in the Dark


Often as it might be said of first collections, Colette Bryce’s The Heel of Bernadette (2000) was a debut of genuine and considerable promise: its taut, economic lines combining everyday vernacular with deftly crafted images and a winning, often unusual musicality, to produce, in its finer moments, poems that were both intellectually provocative and formally agile. It suggested that a more mature and potentially brilliant second collection might follow, but for all its qualities – the poems’ stylish lines, their verve and meticulous execution – its follow-up, The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004), offered little in the way of real surprises, tending to reiterate (with a few notable exceptions) the winsome effects of Bryce’s earlier work.

‘A Spider’, the opening vignette of Self-Portrait in the Dark, quickly and quietly suggests that this new book will be, in at least certain respects, different. A sketch that takes the act of ‘trapp[ing] a spider in a glass’ as symbolic of the narrator’s own circumstances, the tight lines and subtle music of earlier poems are still in evidence, but Bryce makes these resources work harder than previously: manipulating syntax and repetition to conjure a well-pitched tone and convincing atmosphere (‘a glass, / a fine-blown wineglass. / It shut around him, silently’), while pushing her rhyming panache to achieve surprising metaphorical links:

I meant to let him go
but still he taps against the glass
all Marcel Marceau
in the wall that is there but not there,
a circumstance I know.


The effect is an impressive one. Bryce has the knack of making her poems look effortless when a restless intelligence is carefully at work behind them. But it’s when this hard thinking is combined with the looser lines of lengthier poems that the results are most pleasingly unusual and memorable. In ‘The Residents’, for instance, stanzas of slant-rhymed couplets are adopted to describe an eerie, dust-ridden study where ‘mould is blossoming on the wall’; a ‘funk-hole’ which seems to embody the anxiety of literary influence (note the Yeatsian refrain at the end of each stanza) as well as the writer’s fear of failure, especially when its richly described, dilapidated state becomes a reimagining of the room as a crime scene, where

if asked, you could offer a team from forensics:
– various punched-out blister packs
– a fingerprint in a lip-gloss compact
– a half-smoked menthol cigarette
– a woollen scarf unravelling on a hook
– a mildewed draft of her second book
– a culture thriving in her unwashed cup
– a single plimsoll, size five, lace-up […]

An almost darkly comic meditation on the nature of both the literary life and the decidedly contemporary enterprise of the literary residency, the poem goes on to end with these curious and suggestive tangents (‘posit[ing] a case of human combustion / perhaps, or an extra-terrestrial abduction’) cutting suddenly short: ‘skip[ping] three years / to a bright young novelist opening the door; / the inaudible snap of a spider’s thread / as he takes the first steps into your head.’ It succeeds – as in the sudden closure of the final end-rhyme – when the tone is pitched between indifference and a sense of resignation and regret, interrogating the speed of twenty-first century life as it affects writers, readers and literature itself, but also the feeling that much of our world is increasingly disposable and that nothing, not even literature (‘Is this a crime scene? Is it a shrine?’) is ever quite sacred.

Another commendable feature of this new book is its well-judged humour. In the title poem, for example, the narrator’s talk of insomnia, smoking habits and ‘moving on’ from a difficult break-up is smartly juxtaposed with wryly amusing observations: ‘Here, I could easily go off / on a riff / on how cars, like pets, look a little like their owners / but I won’t ‘go there’, / as they say in America, / given it’s a clapped-out Nissan Micra…’ So too, with greater subtlety, in ‘The Poetry Bug’: ‘a moon-pale, lumpish creature’; and the two women in ‘Car Wash’, kissing ‘in a world where to do so / can still stop the traffic.’ Bryce’s wide thematic range is also striking, even if the results are not always successful: ghosts, empty cars, mobile phones, mysterious dwellings and vivid childhood memories recur throughout the collection in poems that are frequently shrouded by cigarette smoke or a strange half-light. A particular highlight is the intricate conceit of ‘Volcanoes’, where the human imagination and the workings of the earth begin to mirror and merge: ‘The mind in the cavern of the skull. / The skull the limits of the skies. / The core in the dark behind the eyes.’

There are reasons to suspect, however, that the renewed depth, wit and imaginative range of Self-Portrait in the Dark may go unmentioned, even unnoticed, by some critics and readers, and this is largely due to the combination of Bryce’s succinct and swift-moving poetic style with the difficulty of uncovering the sometimes elliptical significance of her work. Starting this review with two relatively close readings of Bryce’s poems was an attempt to offset this – the notion that fluent, musical and energetic contemporary poems yield their meanings quickly and cleanly without warranting a great deal of rereading or deliberation. For while there are poems in this book which seem a tad hurried and glib (‘The Knack’; ‘On Highgate Hill’), the majority see Bryce developing a muscular and graceful language capable of dealing with everything from the grander themes (the solitude of ‘Finisterre’; the failures of language in ‘Sin Música’) to the specifics of contemporary life (the junk inside a phone box in ‘Belfast Waking, 6 a.m.’; the detailed introspection of ‘Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-Mirror’). Reading this book through for the first time is something of a mixed experience, but if the poems are given the time and thought they deserve, Self-Portrait in the Dark reveals itself to be a complex and often richly rewarding volume.



first published in Stand magazine

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Review: Siân Hughes's The Missing



Siân Hughes’s The Missing is a short collection of, typically, short poems; a fact that belies this debut’s exactitude, hard-won emotional truths, and long road to completion. It is some thirteen years since Hughes’s vignette “Secret Lives”, appearing here in book form for the first time, first graced London’s tube trains as part of the Poems on the Underground project (and winner of a TLS competition), depicting a familiar suburban world of complex relationships with magical panache; where dressing gowns meet in the middle of the night to “head for a club they know / where the dress code is relaxed midweek, / and the music is strictly soul.” As much of The Missing demonstrates, Hughes has a real talent for capturing such fleeting, subtly significant incidents: a blend of delicate suggestion, invention and colourful wit characterizes her best poems, expressed in unobtrusive, idiomatic language. “The Girl Upstairs”, for example, treads the line between personal happiness and polite society’s expectations with conversational ease. Elsewhere, “The Stairs” provides a familiar snapshot of the difficulties of modern, often fragmented, young families, describing a party “where the children have taken the seats / in the living room”, and “no one consoles / the woman in a low-cut dress sitting outside the bathroom.”

Around midway through, however, the overall tone of the book changes: a shift from the playful, albeit tense feel of these earlier poems, to the brave and compelling pieces of the latter half. The focus here is parenting, particularly its many unforeseeable difficulties, with a number of poems addressing time spent in and out of hospital. These are as affecting and effective for their evocative, yet rarely merely decorative, description (“Fireworks on Ward 4C”), as for their arresting and deft use of speech patterns (in “Mengy Babies”, a distressed mother is found crying: “‘I kept phoning and telling them, something’s gone wrong.’”). But it is in a provocative elegy, “The Send-Off”, that Hughes’s writing seems most urgently committed. A haunting, touching address to the poet’s lost child, diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome before birth, it is difficult to examine the poem in typical critical terms: honest, and devoid of any agenda as it is. Along with many of the poems in The Missing, it memorably reveals the work of a writer capable of addressing emotionally difficult subjects with exceptional clarity and feeling.


first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Monday 4 March 2013

Reviews and The Sparks

I was talking with the poet Conor O'Callaghan the other week about the dwindling number of poetry reviews published these days, particularly by the bigger publications and magazines. When his first full collection, The History of Rain, came out in 1993 with Ireland's Gallery Press, it apparently received around 25 reviews; I sincerely doubt many first books - even those published by the commercial presses - receive that kind of critical attention nowadays.

Unsurprisingly, poetry pamphlets and chapbooks (or short collections) receive even less attention from print magazines, with the notable and admirable exception of a few, particularly Poetry London and its autumn round-up of their 'top ten' (or so) pamphlets of the year. Increasingly then, much reviewing of poetry seems to take place online, in magazines like those I mentioned here recently, and on various widely-read literary blogs. And why not? Many of these blog writers are published poets and reviewers for print and online magazines themselves (myself included), so the blog is the perfect vehicle for reviewing books and pamphlets that print magazines don't have the room for.

One such writer is Tony Williams, a poet soon to have his first collection published by Salt, who also keeps a poetry blog featuring occasional reviews. And I was delighted to discover recently that he's written a generous and insightful review of my pamphlet The Sparks, the second to appear this year, on the back of Noel Williams' piece in arts magazine Now Then. Williams' review also takes in Matthew Clegg's sequence pamphlet Edgelands, published last year by Longbarrow Press. Worth checking out.

Review: Eoghan Walls' The Salt Harvest




Eoghan Walls’s piquant debut crams more than most into its 60-odd pages. Faithful to the gritty physicality of nature, what separates The Salt Harvest from many first collections is a willingness to look for the poetic in pretty much anything, an almost aureate diction, and a darkly exuberant style that at times borders on excess. The book moves from secular hymns to the sea’s unforgiving cycles – the poet praising “lumpfish snapping medusae through stalks in the biomass” – through sketches of home life’s little details (the yard “a damp offstage to the house” in “Thirteen Foot by Six”) to the sprawling otherness of airport terminals and visits from extraterrestrials. For the most part, it comes off. Favouring a loose, typically anapaestic meter shaped into couplets and tercets, Walls can serve up a plate of cockles and gesture towards its human cost just as he more openly handles human frailties: illness, environmental damage, a flood that finds “sandbags are useless”. “An Ethical Taxonomy of Cordyceps” is a bridge too far, but the vigour and reach of The Salt Harvest makes him a poet worth watching.

 
first published in The Guardian, Saturday 21 April 2012

Saturday 2 March 2013

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What's Up Darlin'?



OK, OK... I know there are easier targets to pick on in the world of hackneyed, cliché-ridden song lyric writing than the otherwise talented Dizzee Rascal. I'm actually a pretty big fan of some of his work, particularly 'Fix Up, Look Sharp' from his precociously impressive first album, Boy in da Corner, and the unfortunately titled but belting Brit-hop Grime single 'Pussy'Ole (Old Skool)' from his third release, Maths + English.

But this little snippet of comedy gold is just too good to ignore, revealing as it does the way in which music artists half-disguise such lyrical junk with their vocalisations - which in Dizzee's case, is through rapid-fire, often double dutch style rapping. Get a well-spoken, middle-class radio presenter called Carrie to 'rap' along to the song's tune, however, and what makes for highly danceable Brit-hop descends into the complete farce it lyrically is, and not just because the girl can't rap or sing. I'd recommend watching the original Rascal version (below), before you listen to the Radio 1 spoof (above).



All this, then, and Michael Horovitz was still banging on last week in the Guardian book blogs about 'stuffy academics' ignoring the 'poetry' of Bob Dylan. What Horovitz, like so many others, fails to acknowledge is that there's a reason why the man himself was once so uneasy about critics trawling his lyrics alone for subtext and deeper meanings. You can belittle Germaine Greer as a person (or indeed, academic) all you like, then, but her much-publicised line on song lyrics as poetry is still right, and I'm yet to hear a compelling argument against it: they're not, 'cause all song lyrics collapse without the music they're set to whereas a good poem creates its own music through the rhyme and rhythm of language alone. As I said on this blog a year back, the good poem possesses a singularity that song lyrics - being what they are - lack. Good to see that the majority of reader responses to Horovitz's article were level-headed and considered in their defence of the thrust of Germaine's intelligent standpoint, then.

Oh, and I should point out that I don't think 'Dance Wiv Me' is hilariously solely because it happens to feature that detestable chap Calvin Harris. Not solely.

Friday 1 March 2013

Tonight: Oxfam Poetry - Four Sheffield Poets



Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD