Poetry at Gulliver's, Manchester, 24 June 2015

We had a small, attentive audience for our reading last night at Gulliver's in Manchester. The readers were Carola Luther, Brian Bartlett, Stephen Burt and I. So many good poems and such great company! Here are some photos of the evening--unfortunately I missed snapping a picture of Peter Riley as he had to hurry off for a train.

Neil Campbell, Scott Thurston, and Evan Jones

Nearly the whole gang! (I didn't mean to cut off Carola Luther!)

Jessie Bennett and Stephen Burt

Claire Thompson and Alec Newman

Evan Jones and Carola Luther

Steven Waling carrying a copy of Imagined Sons 


  

My former student Zoë Howarth-Lowe (on the right) and her dad

Reverses Heart's Reassembly by Scott Thurston (Veer Books, 2011)

As Scott Thurston explains in the acknowledgments, "The accounts of dance and movement in the pages that follow relate to my experiences of dancing the Five Rhythms--a movement practice devised by Gabrielle Roth." Here are some of my favourite passages from the collection:


From Section I, Boundaries:


Get out of your own way--to get
in the way of being guided.
Each line equivalent to the whole
book of your fear of dissolution.
Openly revealed, it conceals
a guarantee of a new body.

*

The dancer holds a space for other dancers. I bring a few neatly-parcelled luxury anxieties to sit and unwrap in a clutch of unfolded limbs. [...] To move at emotional depth I need to keep my thoughts in play.

*

Trying to outrun the ego and mourn its lost authority.

*

I'll find it just as well in the un-like.

*

If this is civilization it starts to unravel

in the corner of vision.

*

In the dance--pain, discomfort, exhaustion, injury start to expose the lineaments, the estate of one's self....

from Section II, Compassion: 

What constitutes wildness? Binding both the preserved and the destroyed, resistance can be experienced as pain--memory needs to change all the time.

from Section IV Relation:

The tension between intention to move and moving; between dancing by oneself and with others.

*

I recognised I'd brought a demon with me which I named 'Without Knowledge I Am Nothing.'

*

Approaching knowledge as an encounter.


from Section V, Turning:


...turning and returning
with intricate delay.

*

Trust me to buck the trend in coherency:

in the give and take of talk our mutual

knowledge gives way to being known

on this bleak rib of land, curving upward.

The longing of the endless hills--mynydd

hireaethog--when speech dies on the wind.

*

Moving with the shape of space

creates a wild line. Start to turn

and learn how to serve you and you

trust me.

*

The shape of a choice: lust, trash,

truth, that grace arises from grace.  

Reverses Heart's Reassembly can be bought by post directly from Veer Books or online at Amazon for a mere £5.

The Drunken Boat's

latest issue is up, with such good company as Jennifer K. Dick, Kit Fryatt, Jen Hofer, Rachel Lehrman, Eléna Rivera, and Scott Thurston, among many others. My four poems can be found here; "Ruby" and "Ornament" are part of what I imagine to be a pamphlet in progress, Orphan/age. Thanks to guest editor Melissa Buckheit for her interest in my work.

The Other Room reading

Here's my (dimly lit) reading at The Other Room in April 2011. I read a couple poems by other poets in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets before reading from my collection, Divining for Starters. Thanks again to James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston for inviting me. 

The Other Room Anthology 4

The splendid poetry reading series in Manchester, The Other Room, publishes an annual anthology of its readers. I read there in April last year in the good company of Ken Edwards, Alec Finlay and by video link Derek Henderson, and with the year of readers in the anthology, the company increases to include Tim Allen, Andrea Brady, Alan Halsey, Colin Herd, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Geraldine Monk, and Philip Terry, among others. Visit this page at The Other Room's website to purchase your own copy. 


Thanks to series curators James Davies, Tom Jenks, and Scott Thurston both for the invitation to the original reading and the impressive anthology. 

Another take on Scott Thurston's reading of Internal Rhyme at Furzeacres

The first post on this topic gave some examples of the work on the page. Here are some passages I transcribed during the reading; I have not checked them against the book for accuracy, in part because I am interested in what I may have misheard.

"breaks of touch"

"the young argue to finitude"

"class-beguiling intellect"

"stage-managed sulk"

"anonymous indulgence"

"write it not too late whilst on the way"

"where is that simple expression tied in to a cakewalk to a pleasing"

"welcome back at the new bazaar"

"educated lack"

"scared to death in a poem interrupted by senior figures"

"haunted by surface"

"it takes art to (maintain?) a perpetual crisis"

"holding to what cannot be completed"

"sometimes you trust accidentally dead love"

"beauty conceives its own shape let no one intervene"

Internal Rhyme is available in the UK directly from the publisher as well as the usual suspects and in the US from Amazon.com.

Scott Thurston's Internal Rhyme and the Occasional Reading Series at Furzeacres

Scott Thurston's third collection, Internal Rhyme (Shearsman, 2010), brings together eighty poems that are meant to be read vertically as well as horizontally. Earlier this month, on the Occasional Reading Series at Furzeacres not far from Plymouth, I found it most interesting to hear him read sets of five first horizontally, then vertically, for the changes of sound and sense thus invoked. Here are two (clicking on the first image will enlarge it in a new window; why the second is recalcitrant I don't know).

Internal Rhyme is available in the UK directly from the publisher as well as the usual suspects and in the US from Amazon.com.

What is the Occasional Reading Series? Co-organiser Philip Kuhn describes it thus: "the occasional reading series was initiated in june 2003 and is hosted by rosie musgrave and philip kuhn. Due to the nature of the terrain and the uncertain climate on the Moor the events are only held during the spring and summer months. The aim of the series is to create an alternative to the more conventional poetry readings which usually tend to encourage two or more poets to present short readings from their works. In contrast the occasional reading series invites a single poet to offer (to an invited audience) an extended reading (or performance) from the whole of a long work, or from extended extracts from a long work which might be published or simply work in progress. The readings are followed by light refreshments an occasion which offers audience and poet a chance to socialise renew contacts and re-meet old acquaintances.

To date there have been 21 readings. The last event for this year was Scott Thurston reading Internal Rhyme (Shearsman 2010). It is hoped that the 22nd reading will take place in early Spring 2011."

An insightful review of Yet

There have been three reviews of Yet by poets who, I gather from their reviews, have read little experimental poetry. Trained in practical criticism to the exclusion of other ways of reading, it seems, the reviewers try hard to "decode" the poems rather than seeing how a poetics of consciousness might work. I don't fault them for that--it's partly a result of the gulf between mainstream and experimental British poetry.

Imagine my pleasure, then, on the occasion of Scott Thurston's more understanding review of Yet in Stride. I don't agree with all he says, but his appreciation of the Divinings as thinking through language in the lyric makes me hopeful that when Divining for Starters comes out at last, there will be some readers who enjoy it for what it is.

Pamphlets

Homecoming

Dancing Girl Press, September 2013
$7 US plus P&P / £5 direct

Homecoming picks up on a sense of isolation in the American Midwest as well as its emphasis on the more positive attributes of family life. Thus when the father falls to injury and illness, his decline upsets the meanings of family, selfhood and home. Poems in Homecoming first appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement and The Warwick Review.

Positive reviews have appeared in Sabotage Reviews, Elsewhere and Luna Luna.

* * * 

Divinations

Punch Press, June 2010

$10 US / $15 elsewhere (SOLD OUT)

Twenty poems from the series Divining for Starters, originally published in Alterran Poetry Assemblage, Cannot Exist, Damn the Caesars, Gists & Piths, Great Works, The Liberal, Painted, spoken, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, and Tenth Muse.

* * *

The Son

Oystercatcher Press, September 2009

ISBN 9781905885244

£4 including UK p&p

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice

Peter Riley describes The Son as "quite startling--a serious work about loss through a terrific play of imaginative resource," while the selectors of the pamphlet choice remark, "There is something too, about how time moves, or how it doesn't, in a world akin to that nightmare in which you are running and running and your legs are jelly and you are getting nowhere. The fact that the poems in this collection are either prose poems, which can shuffle on the spot, rather than move along with a sense of narrative, or catechisms which go back and forth with different responses to the same question, adds to an overall feeling of being trapped. Indeed, these poems work by accretion, so the more you read, the more powerful that feeling becomes."

Other reviews include Alan Baker on his blog, Litterbug; three at Sphinx, by Rob A. MacKenzie, Marcia Menter, and Helena Nelson; and Rupert Loydell in Shadowtrain.

The Son evokes a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined Sons, prose poems which envision the now-grown son and birthmother in a moment of contact; and Birthmother's Catechisms, in which the same question--e.g., What day is today?, How did you let him go?--recurs with changing answers. Moreover, after Al Qaeda's attacks on the US in 2001, the anniversary of the son's birth becomes complicated by the fact that both occur on September 11th.

Many of the pamphlet's poems have already been published in Barrow Street, PN Review, The Republic of Letters, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The Son comes from a book-length manuscript, Imagined Sons, presumably forthcoming. It was launched at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath on 26 October 2009, along with Janet Sutherland's second collection, Hangman's Acre (Shearsman).

* * *

Yet
Leafe Press, February 2008
ISBN 9780953540198
£3.50 (UK) / $8.00 (US) (SOLD OUT)

"Technically Etter often makes use of the arresting juxtapositions of new sentence writing (in both prose and lineated forms) but counterpoints these with threaded-through continuities that generate more settled overall arguments. This is used to great effect in 'Paternal', which hints at family illness, even death, but in a way which keeps pathos firmly at bay [...]. Elsewhere this technique simply allows more space into the poem, and for the mind to savour the relationships between images as much as the images themselves [...]. Yet is an excellent introduction to Etter's work for British readers and promises much for her new books due this year and next."

--Scott Thurston, Stride

"The eighteen or so poems here vary in structure, intent and layout—sometimes it seems perversely so, but Etter is a poet who knows exactly what she is doing. This isn’t in any sense an easy collection and I mean that as an endorsement. I was intrigued, impressed and ultimately bowled over by its hard-won lyricism."

--Eleanor Livingstone, Sphinx

* * *

Subterfuge for the Unrequitable
Potes & Poets, 1998
ISBN 9780937013793
$6.00 (SOLD OUT)

To “register the tongue’s torque,” Carrie Etter’s poems show great skill and a willingness to take risks, both rare things in a “first book.” This writing is simultaneously “out there” and always also immediately present (in the most literal sense of “with it”), an experience that is by turns centering and dizzying. It’s quite a ride.

Ron Silliman

Attention and compassion direct this finely chiseled work. Etter’s quick eye focuses on precise moments of change and of emergence—those crucial moments where life gets really interesting—and sculpts them into wholes with an unusually attuned ear, an ear that catches always a subtle music and often a marvelous oddity—what an agile vocabulary! These are poems that wake you up when you thought you were already awake.

Cole Swensen