Bastille Day at Oxfam
My first night out since the kittens arrived, and it was a weird sort of wrench to leave the flat with the week-old arrivals running around after their extended afternoon nap and clearly wanting to play.
However, I persevered with my intention and was glad I did, because I got myself to the poetry reading at Oxfam's books & music flagship store on Marylebone High Street - but poetically and gastronomically we were transported to Paris, with complimentary wine and cheeses. A great variety in fact of fromages and poets - celebrating Bastille day with various English Language poets who all have connections with the Paris-based English Language poetry community. As organiser and host Todd Swift commented, even English Language poetry written abroad has a distintiveness about it, a difference and an originality which I really appreciated - found myself concentrating more than I'm normally able to do during an evening of readings, truth be told.
A mixture of voices and paces though - no more hardline avant-garde, than recognisably mainstream, but oscillating somewhere between these two poles. Seven poets altogether, all good, and I won't plod through each in turn, but particularly liked Rufus Quinto's startling poems made solely of monosyllabic words - each seemed to click together like a magic puzzle, each short word glinting with necessity. Also liked the intelligent, expansive collage like poems of Barbara Beck, and the quickfire luminescence of Jennifer K Dick, who was reading poems produced in 'correspondance' with another, American-based poet, each riffing on the Orpheus-Euridice myth transposed over the locations of their respective underground systems. Neat. I'm sure there's room for a London-based entry into that seminar at some point.
Beck is editor in chief of Upstairs At Duroc, the magazine produced by the Paris-based writers, which I didn't know about previously; I've come home with an anniversary edition. In addition I came home with the latest edition of Tears in the Fence; a periodical I'm much more aware of, though good to hear editor David Caddy read tonight - he has a theatrical style of delivery which helped keep the audience involved at the very end of the evening. I also bought Jennifer Dick's collection 'Flourescence' which is both lyrical and experimental, and appropriately enough, engaged in the mysteries of translation and language itself: 'What isn't to be trusted is translated...It is the click snapping. The nap of numbers. The way language means. Signals.' ('Shutters'). The cadences sound so convincing here; one almost forgets how tricksy the semantics might be.
It's great in a kind of nostalgic, romantic way to realise there is still such a vibrant writing community of English language texts in Paris; that this community of writers didn't die out after Gertrude Stein and co; though it has certainly changed, it's kept its experimental edge.
A shame that this is the last in the Oxfam series, these readings have a generous atmosphere that makes one want to get involved and find new collections to read, especially now most of the academic deadlines have been met and reading should really be the order of the day. Note to self - don't stay in with the kittens so much that language flies so gracefully by, unobserved.
However, I persevered with my intention and was glad I did, because I got myself to the poetry reading at Oxfam's books & music flagship store on Marylebone High Street - but poetically and gastronomically we were transported to Paris, with complimentary wine and cheeses. A great variety in fact of fromages and poets - celebrating Bastille day with various English Language poets who all have connections with the Paris-based English Language poetry community. As organiser and host Todd Swift commented, even English Language poetry written abroad has a distintiveness about it, a difference and an originality which I really appreciated - found myself concentrating more than I'm normally able to do during an evening of readings, truth be told.
A mixture of voices and paces though - no more hardline avant-garde, than recognisably mainstream, but oscillating somewhere between these two poles. Seven poets altogether, all good, and I won't plod through each in turn, but particularly liked Rufus Quinto's startling poems made solely of monosyllabic words - each seemed to click together like a magic puzzle, each short word glinting with necessity. Also liked the intelligent, expansive collage like poems of Barbara Beck, and the quickfire luminescence of Jennifer K Dick, who was reading poems produced in 'correspondance' with another, American-based poet, each riffing on the Orpheus-Euridice myth transposed over the locations of their respective underground systems. Neat. I'm sure there's room for a London-based entry into that seminar at some point.
Beck is editor in chief of Upstairs At Duroc, the magazine produced by the Paris-based writers, which I didn't know about previously; I've come home with an anniversary edition. In addition I came home with the latest edition of Tears in the Fence; a periodical I'm much more aware of, though good to hear editor David Caddy read tonight - he has a theatrical style of delivery which helped keep the audience involved at the very end of the evening. I also bought Jennifer Dick's collection 'Flourescence' which is both lyrical and experimental, and appropriately enough, engaged in the mysteries of translation and language itself: 'What isn't to be trusted is translated...It is the click snapping. The nap of numbers. The way language means. Signals.' ('Shutters'). The cadences sound so convincing here; one almost forgets how tricksy the semantics might be.
It's great in a kind of nostalgic, romantic way to realise there is still such a vibrant writing community of English language texts in Paris; that this community of writers didn't die out after Gertrude Stein and co; though it has certainly changed, it's kept its experimental edge.
A shame that this is the last in the Oxfam series, these readings have a generous atmosphere that makes one want to get involved and find new collections to read, especially now most of the academic deadlines have been met and reading should really be the order of the day. Note to self - don't stay in with the kittens so much that language flies so gracefully by, unobserved.
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