Saturday, November 19, 2016

Simon Perrril at The Arts Centre, Edge Hill

Simon Perril read at the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, on the 16th: a wonderful evening of poetry and visuals. He's carrying one of them below!
 
Simon Perril was born in 1968 and lives in Oakham, Rutland. His poetry collections include Nitrate (Salt) and A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher Press). He has written widely on contemporary poetry and poetics, and edited The Salt Companion to John James (Salt). He teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, and loves silent movies and noisy music. And cats.
 
"My poetry roots go back to discovering the New American Poetry of the 50s and 60s and the "British Poetry Revival" of the 60s and 70s pretty much simultaneously, thanks to local book dealers in Cambridge, and the alternative academy that was Compendium bookshop in Camden, London. Reading the work of Iain Sinclair and Tom Raworth was particularly influential early on, and it didn't take long to find other contemporary 'linguistically innovative' poets as a student at Cambridge College of Art and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).”
 
 Recent books are the related Archilochus on the Moon (Bristol: Shearsman, 2014) and Between (Bristol: Shearsman, 2016)), both of which Simon read from. Before the evening he aired a new poetics piece for my MA group.
 
 
The first half featured winners of the Rhiannon Evans Poetry Award: Joanne Ashcroft, Laura Tickle, Sarah Billington, Steve Fletcher and Jessica Tillings, all of whom read well. Four of them are featured on Pages. See here for posts to 25 Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill: