I Don't Call Myself a Poet: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Living & Working in Britain

As part of her teaching at the University of Middlesex, Sophie Mayer has done a wonderful thing, creating a compendium of interviews with a wide range of UK poets, including, happily, myself. It includes Andrea Brady, Vahni Capildeo, Mimi Khalvati, John Kinsella, Ira Lightman, Chris McCabe, Daljit Nagra, Shazea Quraishi and Jane Yeh--and many more! Apparently the 68 interviews are just the beginning, with more forthcoming. It looks to become a valuable resource for readers and students alike.

Catching Up with Anthologies: The Best British Poetry 2011

NB: In all the "catching up" entries, I have work in the publication.

Salt Publishing and Roddy Lumsden have come up with a British parallel to the well established Best American Poetry Series overseen by David Lehman. The first editor is Lumsden himself, to be followed by Sasha Dugdale next year. While the initial volume is a largely mainstream selection (with, strangely, not a prose poem in sight), it possesses greater energy and range than the annual Forward Book of Poetry, as evidenced in poems by Gillian Allnutt, Amy De'Ath, and Chris McCabe, among others.

The advantage of a single poet reading through a year's magazines for selections, over the Forward's approach of taking four selections from each magazine editor, manifests in the larger selection of younger and emerging poets therein. It's good, too, to see in the represented magazines a mix of the usual suspects (Poetry Review and Poetry London, but not, interestingly, TLS or LRB) and such internet journals as Ink, Sweat and Tears and Shadowtrain and more experimental journals like QUID and Shearsman. Part of the success of the American series has come from annual editors' choices seemingly pushing beyond personal taste, in an attempt to recognise the best work whatever the style; that range in choice of editors and work selected will need to increase as the series goes on for it to distinguish itself from the Forward. Here's hoping!

Current Issues

My apologies for the long delay in posting--I've been suffering from injury to both eyes since April. I thought I had a recurring eye infection, but it turns out that my contacts had caused damage to my corneas. I've been wearing my glasses (ack) since June, and the amount of time I can spend on computer without discomfort has been slowly increasing.

On 12 August I read on the Crossing the Line series at The Poetry Cafe in London; fellow readers were Chris McCabe (whose first book, The Hutton Inquiry, was recently released from Salt) and Piers Hugill. It was a great pleasure to have an interested audience for my experimental work, and it's encouraged me to resume work on a book manuscript of this work under the tentative title Divining for Starters.

I've also been working on two reviews, and I recommend both books warmly: my review of Fiona Sampson's The Distance Between Us (Seren) will appear in TLS, and my review of Jorie Graham's Overlord (Carcanet) in The Liberal. I also have a new poem, "Were It Eden," forthcoming in The Liberal.