I've received a few emails lately asking about upcoming courses, so I thought I'd post the information here.
The Poetry School (Bath)
The Opportunities of Form, in its summer 2007 term, will look at the structures of free verse, beginning with the stanza. I believe there are a few places available. The course meets alternate Wednesday nights, 7-9 p.m., beginning 25 April for five sessions, and it takes place at The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute on Queen Square in Bath. See The Poetry School website or email me to find out how to enroll.
Publishing Your Poetry is a one-day course running Saturday, 19 May, from 10:30-4:30, also at BRLSI. This regular course of mine addresses submitting one's work for magazine publication: how to gauge which magazines are appropriate for your work, how to prepare submissions, inside experience and advice, etc.
The Kingcombe Centre (Dorset)
From Friday, 17-Sunday, 19 August, Gerard Woodward and I will hold an intensive weekend workshop for poets--like a mini-Arvon. Activities will include workshops, readings, discussions about the contemporary poetry scene (including publishing), exercises, etc. The Kingcombe Centre is a wonderful retreat, and catering's included. From the website, select "Holidays & Courses" from the menu, then choose "August," and scroll down to find Gerard and I's course.
If you have questions about any of these courses, feel free to email me at carrie (dot) etter (at) gmail (dot) com.
Friday, 6 April 2007
Monday, 2 April 2007
Underlying Propositions
for Richard Kerridge's paper, "Public and Private Environments," delivered at the Poetry and Public Language Conference at the University of Plymouth on Saturday, 31 March, 2007 (all written by Kerridge):
"Environmental crisis (abrupt and catastrophic climate change, intensifying conflicts over natural resources, desertification, loss of water, environmental refugees, loss of fish stocks, loss of biodiversity and natural habitat) is likely to transform the world in the next one hundred years.
"To perceive this crisis clearly and act effectively in response to it, people will need to change a number of assumptions common and traditional in literature and culture: assumptions about human responsibility and about the meaning of the natural world.
"Our customary habits of mind 'are no longer adequate and appropriate for understanding and responding to the kind of below-the-surface, beyond-the-present, time-distantiated hazards that have arisen (Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity, 1998, p. 59). 'I suspect we're reluctant to think about it because we're worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else.... We deeply don't want to believe this story' (John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 22 March 2007).
"It isn't that people aren't persuaded, nominally. The impasse environmentalists face, with increasing urgency, is that environmentalism can be found all over the place in culture but has made only tiny differences, if any, to behaviour. The government's inconsistency in simultaneously proclaiming climate change as the greatest threat the world faces and planning huge expansions of British airports reflects similar inconsistencies in the behaviour of individuals.
"Some literary traditions, most obviously Pastoral, Romanticism, Nature Writing and Apocalypse, are relevant to this crisis and of great potential in relation to it, but problematical in their characteristic motifs and plots, and the values and characteristics they assign to nature.
"Ecocriticism (literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist position) has often sought to challenge biblical, Baconian and Cartesian traditions that assert a strong distinction between humanity and nature, with other binary oppositions in train (mind/body, thought/feeling, rational/irrational, sciences/humanities, culture/nature, civilised/primitive, modern/premodern, masculine/feminine). This Cartesian tradition is frequently identified with Western industrial modernity, the bundle of beliefs and practices held responsible for global environmental crisis. Ecocritical anti-Cartesianism is itself problematical as a response to environmental crisis, but it has prompted ecocritics to be interested in literary traditions and forms that attempt to break down the oppositions mentioned here.
"Ecological perspectives are required right across culture; perspectives that foreground the interdependence of all life forms, the relative positioning of the different niches they occupy and the common ecosystem they constitute between them in continual dynamic action. Analogies between natural ecosystems and cultural dispositions are valuable if they demonstrate that, for example, the love of nature is confined to a cultural niche in which it has no power to touch other assumptions and behaviours. 'Leisure' is such a niche. Or pastoral lyricism about rural England can still co-exist with brutally industrial farming methods that imply and seek a totally managed and instrumentalised environment; these two discourses are rarely obliged to confront each other.
"As an antidote to Cartesian dualism, some ecocritics have turned to phenomenological traditions, especially the work of Heidegger, whose late essays expressed a kind of explicit environmentalism, and Merleau-Ponty, whose account of embodied perception opens up possibilities for increased awareness of the body's continual material exchange with its ecosystem. These traditions seem to promise a way of getting underneath the problem rather than confronting it ideologically. The possibility they hold out is that our physical senses, once liberated, will make us environmentalists where direct persuasion has failed (failed at least to change behaviour, however it may have changed professed views). Some innovative poets in the Modernist tradition have also been deeply interested in these phenomenological ideas. The literary forms these poets have used--forms of utterance not attached to a particular superintending speaker--have been associated by critics with phenomenology (see, for example, Tony Lopez on Heidegger's influence on W. S. Graham).
"The problem with that phenomenological tradition, from the ecocritical point of view, is its renunciation of long term and long distance perspectives, its continuation of Romantic wistfulness for escape from self-consciousness, its Heideggerean horror at shrinking distances. Environmentalism arises from long term scientific and global perspectives; that is its own modernity. The 1970s slogan 'Think globally, act locally' captures the movement's modernity well: its basis in a perspective that moves between local ecosystems, porously bounded by specific conditions of climate, geology and land use, and the global ecosystem that contains them. Global warming tells us, if we didn't know already, that no corner of the earth can hope to be unaffected by events elsewhere. The global perspective that environmentalism needs and is generated by is distinctively modern, depending on forms of communication that send abundant information and images rapidly around the world. Environmentalism cannot relinquish either the global or the local perspective. It needs some form of dialogue between them.
"Poetry could not have any subject matter more important than this."
"Environmental crisis (abrupt and catastrophic climate change, intensifying conflicts over natural resources, desertification, loss of water, environmental refugees, loss of fish stocks, loss of biodiversity and natural habitat) is likely to transform the world in the next one hundred years.
"To perceive this crisis clearly and act effectively in response to it, people will need to change a number of assumptions common and traditional in literature and culture: assumptions about human responsibility and about the meaning of the natural world.
"Our customary habits of mind 'are no longer adequate and appropriate for understanding and responding to the kind of below-the-surface, beyond-the-present, time-distantiated hazards that have arisen (Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity, 1998, p. 59). 'I suspect we're reluctant to think about it because we're worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else.... We deeply don't want to believe this story' (John Lanchester, London Review of Books, 22 March 2007).
"It isn't that people aren't persuaded, nominally. The impasse environmentalists face, with increasing urgency, is that environmentalism can be found all over the place in culture but has made only tiny differences, if any, to behaviour. The government's inconsistency in simultaneously proclaiming climate change as the greatest threat the world faces and planning huge expansions of British airports reflects similar inconsistencies in the behaviour of individuals.
"Some literary traditions, most obviously Pastoral, Romanticism, Nature Writing and Apocalypse, are relevant to this crisis and of great potential in relation to it, but problematical in their characteristic motifs and plots, and the values and characteristics they assign to nature.
"Ecocriticism (literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist position) has often sought to challenge biblical, Baconian and Cartesian traditions that assert a strong distinction between humanity and nature, with other binary oppositions in train (mind/body, thought/feeling, rational/irrational, sciences/humanities, culture/nature, civilised/primitive, modern/premodern, masculine/feminine). This Cartesian tradition is frequently identified with Western industrial modernity, the bundle of beliefs and practices held responsible for global environmental crisis. Ecocritical anti-Cartesianism is itself problematical as a response to environmental crisis, but it has prompted ecocritics to be interested in literary traditions and forms that attempt to break down the oppositions mentioned here.
"Ecological perspectives are required right across culture; perspectives that foreground the interdependence of all life forms, the relative positioning of the different niches they occupy and the common ecosystem they constitute between them in continual dynamic action. Analogies between natural ecosystems and cultural dispositions are valuable if they demonstrate that, for example, the love of nature is confined to a cultural niche in which it has no power to touch other assumptions and behaviours. 'Leisure' is such a niche. Or pastoral lyricism about rural England can still co-exist with brutally industrial farming methods that imply and seek a totally managed and instrumentalised environment; these two discourses are rarely obliged to confront each other.
"As an antidote to Cartesian dualism, some ecocritics have turned to phenomenological traditions, especially the work of Heidegger, whose late essays expressed a kind of explicit environmentalism, and Merleau-Ponty, whose account of embodied perception opens up possibilities for increased awareness of the body's continual material exchange with its ecosystem. These traditions seem to promise a way of getting underneath the problem rather than confronting it ideologically. The possibility they hold out is that our physical senses, once liberated, will make us environmentalists where direct persuasion has failed (failed at least to change behaviour, however it may have changed professed views). Some innovative poets in the Modernist tradition have also been deeply interested in these phenomenological ideas. The literary forms these poets have used--forms of utterance not attached to a particular superintending speaker--have been associated by critics with phenomenology (see, for example, Tony Lopez on Heidegger's influence on W. S. Graham).
"The problem with that phenomenological tradition, from the ecocritical point of view, is its renunciation of long term and long distance perspectives, its continuation of Romantic wistfulness for escape from self-consciousness, its Heideggerean horror at shrinking distances. Environmentalism arises from long term scientific and global perspectives; that is its own modernity. The 1970s slogan 'Think globally, act locally' captures the movement's modernity well: its basis in a perspective that moves between local ecosystems, porously bounded by specific conditions of climate, geology and land use, and the global ecosystem that contains them. Global warming tells us, if we didn't know already, that no corner of the earth can hope to be unaffected by events elsewhere. The global perspective that environmentalism needs and is generated by is distinctively modern, depending on forms of communication that send abundant information and images rapidly around the world. Environmentalism cannot relinquish either the global or the local perspective. It needs some form of dialogue between them.
"Poetry could not have any subject matter more important than this."
Monday, 26 March 2007
I've never been to Burma, but
the British Council Reading Club there has "Drought" as one of their latest selections.
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
Updated list of readers for student reading at The George
Sue Boyle
Sally Carr
Sue Chadd
Ellie Evans
Stewart Foster
Donald Gibson
Zoe Howarth
Richard Lambert
Helen Pizzey
Rebecca Preston
Emily Reb
Lynette Rees
Sebastian Rigler
Mark Sayers
Andrew Turner
Tom Weir
Ros Weston
John Wheway
...and more to come!
Sally Carr
Sue Chadd
Ellie Evans
Stewart Foster
Donald Gibson
Zoe Howarth
Richard Lambert
Helen Pizzey
Rebecca Preston
Emily Reb
Lynette Rees
Sebastian Rigler
Mark Sayers
Andrew Turner
Tom Weir
Ros Weston
John Wheway
...and more to come!
Monday, 19 March 2007
Gala student reading, 26 May
I proposed a reading by my Poetry School seminar students for the Bristol Poetry Festival, only to learn that they'd have to be vouched for by a "promoter" to be considered. Only I and one student can obtain such a reference, so I'll have to let it go for now.
Wanting to give those students a showcase for their work, and feeling that I'd been unusually fortunate this year in the quality of my students for both The Poetry School and Bath Spa, I've arranged with The George in Bradford on Avon to hold a reading on the evening of Saturday, 26 May. So far, I've had confirmations from Donald Gibson, Richard Lambert, Ros Weston, and John Wheway, and expect many more by Saturday, when I'll have seen all the students again (those are heavy weeks, when I'm teaching all four groups--Poetry School Opportunities of Form, Poetry School seminar, Bath Spa Sudden Prose, and Bath Spa MA poetry workshop).
Updates to follow in due course!
Wanting to give those students a showcase for their work, and feeling that I'd been unusually fortunate this year in the quality of my students for both The Poetry School and Bath Spa, I've arranged with The George in Bradford on Avon to hold a reading on the evening of Saturday, 26 May. So far, I've had confirmations from Donald Gibson, Richard Lambert, Ros Weston, and John Wheway, and expect many more by Saturday, when I'll have seen all the students again (those are heavy weeks, when I'm teaching all four groups--Poetry School Opportunities of Form, Poetry School seminar, Bath Spa Sudden Prose, and Bath Spa MA poetry workshop).
Updates to follow in due course!
Wednesday, 14 March 2007
The Moderator
Last week, as part of the Bath Literature Festival, I served as the moderator for a "Poets in Conversation" event with Tim Liardet and Gerard Woodward at the Victoria Art Gallery. The venue, with the current Keith Vaughan exhibition all around us, provided a pleasant and intimate atmosphere. As moderator, I felt it important to do two things: to keep the conversation rolling and interesting; and to provide useful introductions to each author's work, to guide the audience when they heard the poems read. With Tim it was easy--he always has something to say, but with Gerard, I was glad I was prepared, e.g. when he said he hadn't thought about masculinity much in reference to his poetry (and let it stop there), I told him how I saw it working in his poem "Norfolk." I mention this not to compliment myself; it's just that I've seen panels badly moderated often enough to know how to avoid the same.
I am pleased with how my introductions turned out, so I'll include them here:
"Gerard Woodward has published a trilogy of novels, the last installment of which, Curious Earth, was launched just last week. He has published four books of poetry, and the most recent, We Were Pedestrians, was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize.
"In each poem in We Were Pedestrians, the opening lines plunge us into a new predicament. The style spare, the narrator regarding his situation with both care and aesthetic detachment, the poems proceed slowly, carefully, toward unexpected, convincing conclusions. The poems do not celebrate the ordinary so much as appreciate it for itself, for its commonness and hence its claim on our lives. His style reminds me of the work of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, in that in both their works, the apparent effortlessness evinces the authors' delicate, self-effacing skill."
"Tim Liardet has published five collected of poetry, to critical acclaim. His most recent, The Blood Choir, won an Arts Council England Writer's Award in 2003 and was shortlisted for the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize.
"Where Gerard's style is spare, Tim's is lushly analytical, in the density of description used to apprehend the world, part by part. The Blood Choir presents poet as anthropologist, interpreting an alien culture by describing behaviour and environment in meticulous, exquisite detail. Importantly given the book's focus on prisoners, the narrator understands his relation to his subjects in a way that does not privilege his own position or viewpoint, but tries to appreciate theirs through the nuances of a common language."
After the event, it occurred to me that moderating is like reviewing: sometimes tedious, sometimes onerous in preparation, it's a real pleasure once the work is properly underway.
I am pleased with how my introductions turned out, so I'll include them here:
"Gerard Woodward has published a trilogy of novels, the last installment of which, Curious Earth, was launched just last week. He has published four books of poetry, and the most recent, We Were Pedestrians, was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize.
"In each poem in We Were Pedestrians, the opening lines plunge us into a new predicament. The style spare, the narrator regarding his situation with both care and aesthetic detachment, the poems proceed slowly, carefully, toward unexpected, convincing conclusions. The poems do not celebrate the ordinary so much as appreciate it for itself, for its commonness and hence its claim on our lives. His style reminds me of the work of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, in that in both their works, the apparent effortlessness evinces the authors' delicate, self-effacing skill."
"Tim Liardet has published five collected of poetry, to critical acclaim. His most recent, The Blood Choir, won an Arts Council England Writer's Award in 2003 and was shortlisted for the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize.
"Where Gerard's style is spare, Tim's is lushly analytical, in the density of description used to apprehend the world, part by part. The Blood Choir presents poet as anthropologist, interpreting an alien culture by describing behaviour and environment in meticulous, exquisite detail. Importantly given the book's focus on prisoners, the narrator understands his relation to his subjects in a way that does not privilege his own position or viewpoint, but tries to appreciate theirs through the nuances of a common language."
After the event, it occurred to me that moderating is like reviewing: sometimes tedious, sometimes onerous in preparation, it's a real pleasure once the work is properly underway.
Thursday, 1 March 2007
Okay, I found something stranger....
This is what happens when I search my name on Google to see if someone's reviewed a magazine and mentioned my work, if someone's posted a poem of mine on her website, etc.
At what appears to be a Hungarian language school, there is a competition to translate various poems from English into Hungarian, and one of the three is my prose poem from New Writing 14, "Drought"! What's perhaps stranger (yes, this one just builds) are the two other poems people can choose from: a Roald Dahl poem, "The Tummy Beast," and "Choosing Names," author unknown, about God naming the animals. The competition details are here.
I think that's all the Googling I can take for today.
At what appears to be a Hungarian language school, there is a competition to translate various poems from English into Hungarian, and one of the three is my prose poem from New Writing 14, "Drought"! What's perhaps stranger (yes, this one just builds) are the two other poems people can choose from: a Roald Dahl poem, "The Tummy Beast," and "Choosing Names," author unknown, about God naming the animals. The competition details are here.
I think that's all the Googling I can take for today.
I never thought I'd be compared with Carol Ann Duffy, but
In the online book review Book Munch, Claire Mapletoft, complaining generally about the poetry in New Writing 14, writes, "There are some real belters here however, for example Carola Luther's Possessions and Carrie Etter's Divorce, reminiscent of an early Carol Ann Duffy."
I suppose stranger things have happened....
I suppose stranger things have happened....
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Current Issues and Forthcoming Readings
I received an acceptance yesterday, and that returned my attention to poetry; I hope to spend more time on my work now that I'm healthy again, my father's on the mend, and the semester's underway.
"Reckoning," an enigmatic little poem, will make its first appearance in The Liberal, and Orange Coast Review will reprint two poems that were first published in UK magazines, "As If to Say" and "San Fernando Valley Love Song." I am glad to see poems gaining a longer shelf life and a larger audience in this way and wish more US magazines would consider work that's previously appeared only in print in the UK (and not at all on the web). When both magazines are primarily available only in their country of origin, I don't see why they shouldn't reprint work from abroad.
So it's been a good if slow start to the year, with acceptances also from TLS (for "The Diagnosis," which appeared only weeks before my father's illness, strangely) and Great Works. There are also two prose poems up at Free Verse. A handful of magazines have held my work for 5+ months now, and that's starting to feel like the norm, unfortunately.
There are several events coming up. I'll be moderating "Poets in Conversation" at the Bath Literature Festival, with Tim Liardet and Gerard Woodward as the conversing and reading poets. I've heard it's sold out. That will be Thursday, 8 March, with a 7 for 7:30 start, at The Victoria Art Gallery. It should be a good event.
I'll be giving a paper on Peter Reading's -273.15 (which I can't recommend highly enough) at the Poetry and Public Language Conference at the University of Plymouth, 30 March-1 April. If you're in Bath that weekend, you might want to check out the Globalisation and Writing conference at Bath Spa--I'd be there if I weren't in Plymouth. For details of the latter, e-mail conference organiser Jonathan Neale at j (dot) neale (at) bathspa (dot) ac (dot) uk.
There are two readings for June. One will be a benefit for Macmillan Cancer Care at the Italian Garden at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire (what a location!), on the evening of Friday, 8 June (details forthcoming). Fellow readers include Sally Carr, Linda Saunders, David Hale, Sue Chadd, and Matt Bryden. The next will be for the Bath Spa reading series at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, on Thursday, 14 June, with Moniza Alvi.
"Reckoning," an enigmatic little poem, will make its first appearance in The Liberal, and Orange Coast Review will reprint two poems that were first published in UK magazines, "As If to Say" and "San Fernando Valley Love Song." I am glad to see poems gaining a longer shelf life and a larger audience in this way and wish more US magazines would consider work that's previously appeared only in print in the UK (and not at all on the web). When both magazines are primarily available only in their country of origin, I don't see why they shouldn't reprint work from abroad.
So it's been a good if slow start to the year, with acceptances also from TLS (for "The Diagnosis," which appeared only weeks before my father's illness, strangely) and Great Works. There are also two prose poems up at Free Verse. A handful of magazines have held my work for 5+ months now, and that's starting to feel like the norm, unfortunately.
There are several events coming up. I'll be moderating "Poets in Conversation" at the Bath Literature Festival, with Tim Liardet and Gerard Woodward as the conversing and reading poets. I've heard it's sold out. That will be Thursday, 8 March, with a 7 for 7:30 start, at The Victoria Art Gallery. It should be a good event.
I'll be giving a paper on Peter Reading's -273.15 (which I can't recommend highly enough) at the Poetry and Public Language Conference at the University of Plymouth, 30 March-1 April. If you're in Bath that weekend, you might want to check out the Globalisation and Writing conference at Bath Spa--I'd be there if I weren't in Plymouth. For details of the latter, e-mail conference organiser Jonathan Neale at j (dot) neale (at) bathspa (dot) ac (dot) uk.
There are two readings for June. One will be a benefit for Macmillan Cancer Care at the Italian Garden at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire (what a location!), on the evening of Friday, 8 June (details forthcoming). Fellow readers include Sally Carr, Linda Saunders, David Hale, Sue Chadd, and Matt Bryden. The next will be for the Bath Spa reading series at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, on Thursday, 14 June, with Moniza Alvi.
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