Even Supposing-- and the new issue of Blackbox Manifold

Some months ago (I believe it was April), I spoke of a new project I'd embarked on, an erasure of Esther Summerson's chapters in Charles Dickens' Bleak House, which I've tentatively titled Even Supposing-- (both Esther's last words in and the last words of the novel, including that splendid dash). The first chapter from that project appears in the new issue of Blackbox Manifold, and I have wonderful company, with Ray DiPalma, Anne Gorrick, Paul Green, W.N. Herbert, Tony Lopez, Erin Moure, Ian Seed, Aidan Semmens, and John Wilkinson, among others, as well as a special feature on Peter Robinson. I'm delighted to be a part of it. 

A truly pluralist UK event

When one of last year's Eliot Prize judges commented on the breadth of the shortlist, when another poet commented on the impressive range of the Ted Hughes Award shortlist, I laughed, as the breadth of each seemed about the width of my thumbnail.

Now comes an outstanding "colloquy of poets" at the University of Hull this November, where Philip Gross and Tony Lopez have each invited four favourite poets to read with them in a wonderful array of readers and poetries: John Burnside, Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Manson, Daljit Nagra, Denise Riley, Zoe Skoulding, Carol Watts, and Susan Wicks. Unfortunately, the event is the same weekend as the National Association for Writers in Education annual conference, so I'll miss it, but if you'd like to attend (and report back?), you can find further details here--just scroll down to 13-14 November.

Infinite Difference's first blurb

The first of two solicited blurbs has arrived, and I'm most pleased. It comes from Tony Lopez, Professor Emeritus of Poetry at Plymouth University and author of False Memory (Salt, 2003), among many other works.

"Here’s a new anthology with a job to do, which introduces a whole range of committed writing at the intersection of the personal and political. Here is the text of war, nature after ecological threat, ID in the information age, autobiography and displaced language turned into poetics, sexuality, anger and love. It’s a beautiful sampler, a way in, and a report from the front: very soon now it will be indispensable."