25 Edge Hill Poets: Alice Lenkiewicz

Alice Lenkiewicz was an English and Art graduate of the BA programme at Edge Hill University: she is a well-published poet and fiction writer, AND a visual artist and gallery owner. All the images, book covers and otherwise, are by Alice.

Poems from Maxine

Maxine

Published by bluechrome publishing

2005

ISBN: 1904781721

Exercise 4 in floating

eyes open eyes shut

in space (someone I once knew)

darkness empty road

head rotates

mechanism of distant tears

key floats away

towards shimmering

wet pavement

casting remains of blindness departed the empty room

towards emptiness to store things precious to cast

and bury the surface a clear stone of greyness covered

all six through doors greying further in-between myself

gliding an area base since walking to store things

burns the cast mixture with sadness since that is the red

of it placed inside the tide within the inner pulling

edges beyond the darkness

Poems from Men Hate Blondes

The Fire Starters

In 1932

He shed his shoes

Walked past the grey

Drab apartment blocks

And entered the forest

Of rising flames where an unfamiliar

Sky followed a trail of amber smoke

Above the vivid horizon

An eagle watched

The empty silence the good

And safe place smoke

Moving but silent

There was a moment of consideration

As he entered the clearing

Redwood trees

And fragments

Translucent in shadows

The 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre

we walked the river

land without shadows

everywhere knowing

                 you’ve lost all sense of shame

the sun unfastens a still

café triggers the “raid”

for hooch as the mob fired

                seven victims at 2122

not a word spoken

each time returning

footsteps come into our lives

               in the view of streetlamps

my eyes weeping

snow is falling

there he lies body black

               dreaming of strange cities

secrets gather the sleepy

horizon to lose identity

re-enter the real world

              to have nothing else to give

as the light fell away

i stood there beside the

wonder wheel

             as the sea soothes this first day

Clubbing:

Fleeting light glides a thought while eyes ponder the madness of gold. Between insults, jealousy of glitter creates a sleek glance.

∆

Her sight demands no chance for the hurt to see inside. Completion of isolation will extend towards the ceiling inside a pink haze.

∆

Interference rejects the smile but now there is movement and desire only in the memory. The faking is possible underneath a glass floor, or is it fate.

∆

Enough punching ground for later. Gold is an illusion. Only one door here. Lights obey. Maybe the glow is the after-thought. But did it really happen.

∆

There is nothing to fear. Her immobile state creates a line of falling statues. Walls are vital for advice. Tables and chairs in need of the right balance. Anguish creates the prize.

∆

                                                                  

Remnants of voices magnify the emptiness of the night before in front of scattered particles. The ritual guarded by her vision of a miracle, vodka cuts through her body.

∆

                                                                  

No good pretending it didn’t happen. Anger of course was always part of it. Never a reason to look official in black.

∆

                                                                    

Maniacs of vulnerable youth. Tragedy compartments meet the flower junkies. The betrayal is surrounding me.

Maxine links

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/04/alice-lenkiewicz-poems-from-maxine.html

http://peggysblueskylight.blogspot.co.uk/2005/11/three-book-launches-by-edge-hill.html

http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/interview4-alice-lenkiewicz.html

http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/interview-alice-lenkiewicz.html

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/alice+lenkiewicz/maxine/4502388/

http://www.artinliverpool.com/?p=536

http://www.literaturenorthwest.co.uk/author/195

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10150142920437152&set=vb.153532781340095&type=3&permPage=1

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/misc/reviews/maxine.htm

http://www.poetrykit.org/liv/0032.htm

http://www.newartistfair.com/feb-2012-angelislington-exhibition.html

http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol15/lenkiewicz/bio.html

Men Hate Blondes ·         Paperback: 108 pages ·         Publisher: original plus (1 Nov 2009) ·         Language: English ·         ISBN-10: 0956243347 ·         ISBN-13: 978-0956243348

Men Hate Blondes links

http://thesamsmith.webs.com/originalpluscollections.htm#463291876

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/alice-lenkiewicz-and-neon-highway.html

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/misc/reviews/costa_poetry.php

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/alice+lenkiewicz/men+hate+blondes/7188003/

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Men_Hate_Blondes.html?id=8pIXaiYYFkUC

Details of the MA in Creative Writing here.

Robert Sheppard: On a Note of Roy Fisher concerning Christopher Middleton

 

‘I owe CM a debt of understanding,’ Roy Fisher has written recently of Christopher Middleton, in a short note reprinted in the new Shearsman An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013:

At a time when the Sunday broadsheets still carried reviews of new poetry there appeared a review of his book Torse #3. [sic] The piece was by its own standards civilised: but it was patronising, ignorant, insular and weary. I had at that time virtually no contacts and no prospect of getting a book published; but I was working tentatively in a distant corner of the same territory, and the review showed me in an instant how the cards were stacked. It freed me from setting any store by opinions that might come from such a quarter. (Fisher 2014: 196)

 This exemplary declaration of independence (torse 3 was published in 1962) set Fisher up for a career that is definitely and quietly defiant, yet modernist in orientation, with a perceptual poetics that torques the social perspective into the phenomenological. It turns the general philistinism of British cultural life to its own advantage through its awareness that allegiances to influences outside of the Movement Orthodoxy will find precious little support from mainstream culture so one might as well get on with it. Which Fisher did. And which is another story told elsewhere (and traced by Fisher himself throughout the pages of An Easily Bewildered Child).

 I thought of this statement after listening to a poet published by a large independent press bemoaning the sales of his or her recent book. (I’m disguising identity.) It had just comfortably exceeded the hundred mark. I later remarked to a mutual friend that the problem was this poet believed in the world of the published book, whereas poetry publishing, not just small press poetry publishing, is largely a gift-economy. I strained for the words of Fisher above, but couldn’t quite reprise the tone of relief in its release from the world and words of mainstream (and metropolitan) opinion. (I also recalled a story I’d heard of agents from Faber being alarmed, when on sharing a discussion panel with the other Fisher, Allen Fisher, they heard him announce that he sold 500 copies of Brixton Fractals, when they could only shift a hundred copies of an unknown writer. They would have thought of Fisher as unknown, the unofficial channels by which he distributed his work, illegitimate. But which world is disseminating more poetry? That’s even before we examine aesthetics and poetics, and the poetry itself.)

 The review Roy Fisher read, I am guessing, is the one by A. Alvarez, who, as editor of the Penguin The New Poetry, was both detractor of and perpetuator of mainstream orthodoxy, detecting the germ of a poetry of psychological extremism lurking in the Larkinesque – and getting his payoff from the final works and tragic days of his Hampstead neighbour, Sylvia Plath. Middleton’s reported reaction to the ‘patronising, ignorant, insular and weary’ review was to emigrate, finally to the USA where he has lived ever since. I am sure his removal from Britain was more complex than that but the comparison with Fisher’s retreat to a Bely-esque city of modernism in Birmingham, a scratch philosophy concocted out of perceptual scraps, is instructive. Perhaps Middleton should have believed a little less in the world of the published book, and sought a similar freedom in loss.

 

Fisher, Roy. Untitled Note in ‘Tributes to CM’, http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm (accessed 5th October 2014). Fisher is only one of a number of fine tributes.

The Note is also published in Fisher, Roy. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013. ed. Peter Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman, 2014: 196.

 Buy the book here.

See also my own take on Christopher Middleton, published in The Wolf, which kicks off with the same Fisher 'note', here. (There is more on Middleton on this blog here and here and here.)

25 Edge Hill Poets: Laura Tickle

We Are Banished

We carried each stone for two hundred

years,

Lime, but

your fingertips left marks

as though in flesh.

The landscape grew around us

balconies and gold copulas,

and each wrought iron curl pierced you

in some way.

It took millennia

to get the gates to rust,

but we did it, and they closed around us.

The city, born and aged,

is dying.

The cold will fall, and cover us,

long before it even soaks the brick.

Procrastination, you say, makes it seem unfair,

but these are the rules of procreation.

The cities are as old as the Earth,

and have always been feeding.

  The cathedrals

are bone

and still

 We worship.

Laura graduating

Laura blogs here:  

·         https://porphyriareviews.wordpress.com

·         https://www.flickr.com/photos/lauraporphyria/

Laura won  the Rhiannon Evans poetry scholarship this year.

Twenty Five Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University: 25 Poets an introduction

Alice Lenkiewicz Reading at the Tate Gallery

Yes, 25 years. The Creative Writing MA began in 1989 (started by former colleague Mike Hughes) and this milestone is worth noting and celebrating, not least of all because this means the programme pre-dates the massive expansion in the subject in the 1990s (which the university was also an important part of). Edge Hill was proudly early in the field. The MA – subsequently led by Jenny Newman and supported by Pam Jackson (and for a while John Simons and Gill Davies) – has been led by myself since 1996. In the nineties Robert Graham led the BA and later Ailsa Cox and Daniele Pantano pushed that on from a minor subject to become a single honours BA. PhD candidates thrive and now there are seven members of staff, counting Ailsa and myself: Peter Wright, Billy Cowan, James Byrne, Kim Wiltshire, and Rodge Glass, the latest BA Programme Leader. (Access our profiles here.) The £5,000 Edge Hill Prize is awarded annually by Edge Hill University for excellence in a published single author short story collection and is administered by Ailsa.

Former students of the MA have gone on to PhD programmes and others have published widely. One student, Carys Bray, won the Scott Prize for the Short Story, and recently her novel A Song for Issy Bradley was published to acclaim by Hutchinson (and was a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, and was short listed for the Costa). Another graduate, Carol Fenlon, won the Impress Prize. Others publish regularly, such as Clare Massey (now Dean) who featured in the Salt Best Short Stories and in Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar pamphlet series. Poets Alice Lenkiewicz, Debbie Walsh and Joanne Ashcroft had their MA Manuscript work published whole, the last two as still-available pamphlets from Knives, Forks and Spoons. Matt Fallaize also published pamphlets from Erbacce and KSF, including Delete Recover Delete. Angela Keaton has work out from Erbacce too. Joanne Ashcroft went on to win the Purple Moose Prize, part of which involved the publication of the winning entry as a pamphlet, Maps and Love Songs for Mina Loy, by the leading Welsh press Seren. Anthony Keating’s The Ghost Orchard appeared in 2013. Andrew Taylor published his first full-length collection Radio Mast Horizon from Shearsman in 2013, after publishing many pamphlets. Many others too have published stories and poems in magazines and pamphlets. There are annual scholarships for student poets, too, the Rhiannon Evans Award, but also Creative Awards. Joanne Ashcroft and Laura Tickle won the former. Adam Hampton the latter (see here).

Former PhD graduates include the well-known innovative poets cris cheek and Scott Thurston.

 To celebrate this I am publishing the work of 25 poets who were formerly (or are currently) students of Edge Hill University.

All 27 (I know: I'm beyond my limit! but that's good) poets are here (you can read the lower case names at the end of each link with two at the end with their own joint link):

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/25-edge-hill-poets-laura-tickle.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/25-edge-hill-poets-alice-lenkiewicz.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/25-edge-hill-poets-natasha-borton.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/25-edge-hill-poets-scott-thurston.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/25-edge-hill-poets-tom-jenks.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/25-edge-hill-poets-adam-hampton.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/25-edge-hill-poets-michael-egan.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/25-edge-hill-poets-hazel-mutch.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/25-edge-hill-poets-andrew-taylor.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/25-edge-hill-poets-joanne-ashcroft.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/25-edge-hill-poets-sarah-billington.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/25-edge-hill-poets-deborah-walsh.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/25-edge-hill-poets-martin-palmer.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/25-edge-hill-poets-christine-riaz.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/25-edge-hill-poets-cliff-yates.html
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/25-edge-hill-poets-janka-theisler.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/25-edge-hill-poets-carol-fenlon.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/25-edge-hill-poets-matt-fallaize.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/25-edge-hill-poets-dee-mcmahon.html

(suddenly raw links don't seem to work anymore. It's lazy blogging anyway, so here's the last few as links:

Jason Argleton here.
Bill Bulloch here. 
Anthony Arnott here
Steven Fletcher here.
Leigh Harlett here.
Anthony Keating here.

Plus Elio Lomas and Luke Thurogood in collaboration with text and performance here.

Angela Keaton reading at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool

I aim to post a new poet every week for six months.

I thought it might be instructive to list the poets who have visited Edge Hill to fructify the writing of poetry. 

Rose Theatre poetry readings (1998-2015): Aaron Williamson, cris cheek, Tom Raworth, Geraldine Monk (twice), Alan Halsey, Lawrence Upton, Adrian Clarke, Dell Olsen, Rupert Loydell, Maggie O’Sullivan (thrice), Jerome Rothenberg, Scott Thurston (twice), Michael Egan, Neil Addison, Sandeep Parmar, John James, Harriet Tarlo, Lee Harwood (thrice), Allen Fisher (twice), Iain Sinclair, Peter Jaeger, Tim (‘bad hair’) Atkins, Robert Sheppard (twice, once each century), Zoë Skoulding, Cliff Yates, James Byrne, Bill Griffiths, Ken Edwards, Chris McCabe, Rob McKenzie, Erin Moure, Ian Seed, Tony Keating; Jo Blowers danced.

The North West Poets Anthology Sculpted was launched at the Rose with readers (not including some listed above) such as Dinesh Allarajah, Cath Nichols, Lindsey Holland. (though that's from memory).

Members of the Poetry and Poetics Group read frequently, such as Dee McMahon, Alice Lenkiewicz, Joanne Ashcroft, Angela Keaton and Andrew Taylor, at various points, and - as my photos above show - not all these Edge Hill readings were on-site. See here for my 2009 celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the PPRG. 


When funds permitted the Open Meetings of the PPRG welcomed: Simon Perril, Cath Nichols, Ian Davidson, Jeff Hilson, Allen Fisher, John Goodby, John Seed, Carrie Etter.
Roy Fisher read for the MA and this was a public event. Other visitors to particular modules have opened up their work to poetics scrutiny, from Tom Jenks to Eleanor Rees, from Andrew Taylor to John James (that’s the occasion I wrote my poem ‘Yet Another Poem’), from Alan Halsey to Georgia Scott.

The 2013 Literary Collaboration Symposium brought a number of poets into the PPRG remit.

(This list, of course, omits the other kinds of writer often appearing at Edge Hill. All those short story writers visiting on the back of the Edge Hill Prize.)

Another Edge Hill (First year students in Freshers' Week) blog is Peggysblueskylight here. 

And the latest news is that The Black Market Review founded by Daniele Pantano but edited by a committee of students is to be continued after a brief hiatus. Read the lastest edition here. 

 

(The final summing up Edge Hill Poets post (May 8th 2015) may be read here.)

 

Details of the MA in Creative Writing here.

Find out more about this blogzine, Pages, here.

Robert Sheppard