ReView 4: An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton, 276pp, £18.95, Carcanet Press, Alliance House, Cross Street, Manchester. 

[This review was originally published as ‘The Andrew Crozier Reader’, Stride (web), April 2012]

The last 15 years have seen a bumper crop of collected poems by some of our senior or deceased innovative poets, but this book takes that further by offering a Reader. So we get the poems, of course, but we also get some critical prose, and - interleaved between both - we get commentary from the editor, Ian Brinton, as well as commentary by others as background. These intrusions sometimes don’t leave Andrew Crozier’s poems room to breathe on their own. Letters from fellow poets inevitably praise, and snippets from interviews or reproductions of postcards used in the making of poems, move imperceptibly from poetics to interpretation. I offer this as a warning to prospective readers (of which I hope there will be many) in their navigation of this essential and well-edited volume, because this material is important in illuminating the poems and in presenting the many contexts in which Crozier’s work appears, but some might want to avoid it on first reading. 

Thus we have a historicised Crozier. We read the early faultless exercises in American projectivism (both before and after he studied with Charles Olson at Buffalo). We read of his famous re-discovery of Carl Rakosi via some late introductions to the work and writings on Objectivism generally (including one of the best assessments of George Oppen’s early work). We see him moving closer to other members of the so-called Cambridge School (J.H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver, for example), and we witness a strange and unexplained petering out of the creative work after the 1990s (though there are robust critical writings from this century).  

I am still drawn to the excellent sequences of the 1970s as primary evidence of his importance (though I pass over Printed Circuit which Veronica Forrest-Thomson lambasted in Poetic Artifice. Never attempt to copy Prynne.) The Veil Poem of 1971-2 we are told, via the commentaries, amount to 10 responses to 10 postcards of Islamic architecture. I’ve previously read the sequence as a kind of domestic meditation in post-Olsonian process, via English Romanticism, and I still read it that way, despite the recognisable presence of ‘arches’ and ‘carpets’ from the images. The lines ‘How can I know anything so grand/ but from a postcard’ read less ironically, but they proclaim a perceptive balance. The images are ‘banal and/ awful as any literal image’. After all, the 10 poems sign off with a cosmic sweep that can be read as a local corrective to the global pretensions of the poems’ données:

                                                            The dust beneath my

                                    fingernails is all the wisdom I have

                                    to take with me upstairs to my wife.

This still reads like Coleridge of ‘Frost at Midnight’ filtered through A.N. Whitehead, shudderingly beautiful.

Pleats, which was written in 1974, takes this materialist mysticism further, as Douglas Oliver noted in a letter of the time, calling it a ‘quasi-day-to-day history’; its ‘insights … spread out into a wider dimension’, including the domestic as notional and notational experience: ‘Good morning 7 a.m…/Lewes 3858’. (It seems odd that in the commentary, which is so precise about geographical location in Crozier’s earlier life, we are never told he moved to Lewes to work for many years at the nearby Sussex University.) Indeed, much of this notebook-like sequence seems to be ‘about’ moving house, ‘Closing the attic door on memory’. But amid the quotidian there is a growing sense of the role of language in constructing reality. One prose passage offers a meta-discourse on this improvisational ‘dummy book without language’: ‘Every day possibilities suggest themselves and I neglect some or omit to enter them so the book lacks one kind of fullness that I restore as I go along’ by adding passages from elsewhere (I assume). ‘There is no palimpsest writing in the end.’  

For a writer aware of procedure almost on an Oulipo level (and in one of the interview excerpts here he does use the Oulipean word ‘constraint’) it is no surprise that High Zero, a group of 24 poems of 24 lines each, topped and tailed with parodies of Prynne and John James, was written by an unusual procedure. Like a painter (I suppose) working on numerous canvases at once, he wrote all the lines 1, then 2, then 3, etc… until the poems were complete. Whether it needed the chummy in-crowd nodding of the framing poems (the title is a combination of titles by Prynne and James), or indeed needed the painterly technique (or, more precisely, whether a reader needs to know any of this), this sequence is a richly metaphorical examination of the perceptual and imaginational components of the day to day:

                        Rain drips in the casement

                                                of an outdoor life

                                    from day to day bonheur

                        where condensation clings as though breath

                        would fly through the window

                                    still moving slowly

                        in a gathering wave at the meniscus

                               ready to launch itself

                        in immaculate newness.    

Of course, given the method, the poem was itself written day to day, serially. Between each enjambment (and in one of the interviews Crozier is insistent upon the metrical integrity of individual lines) lies the writing of 23 other lines from 23 other unfinished poems. It is quite remarkable in its ‘immaculate newness’.

There are both excellent and less-achieved isolated poems throughout this book but Crozier thought the crowning glory of his poetry was his sequence from the 1990s, ‘Free Running Bitch’ which coalesces many thematic strands, while (as far as I can see) eschewing the techniques of earlier pieces. From his early encounter with American poetry he inherited an insistence upon the spoken voice (he is sceptical in interview about claims for the musicality of language) which he settles into a mode that is capable of calm and emphasis, wonder and despair. House moving has been superseded by house clearance, it seems. He refuses to read (his mother’s?) school

                                    exercise book old

            through disuse, its ruled feint lines still a blank

            history of the world, covered in red like

            an old globe for imperial infants with

            warnings on traffic, tables for everything, and an

            illegible map of home. Don’t run, don’t pass,

            don’t play, don’t follow, don’t hang on, don’t forget.

The prohibitions on the back cover of the exercise book (‘warnings on traffic … Don’t run’) metamorphose into the narrator’s own finely-balanced decision to relinquish the pull of the past whilst refusing to forget it: ‘don’t hang on, don’t forget’. ‘Blank/ history’ and ‘illegible map’ suggest the fragility involved.

Among the critical prose there are a number of pieces on British poetry. Although Crozier’s much-quoted (by me anyway!) ‘Thrills and Frills’ attack upon what I call the Movement Orthodoxy is not included here, there is a welcome and summarising update, ‘Resting on Laurels’, which traces the adventure of canonical poetry in Britain through to the millennium, taking Raine and Armitage as representative figures (we can only have one such figure per decade, he comments). Of the ‘New Poetry’ of the 1990s he snarls, ‘Such poetry was only new in the sense that it was waiting to be recuperated by the canon, prime cuts resting on Movement laurels.’ Pitch against this self-regulating mechanism his rediscovery and re-animation of the isolated Rakosi and you can see why he would feel like this. He writes with feeling of Rakosi (and perhaps of himself), ‘A writing block or inhibition’ - particularly professional work getting in the way of writing - ‘is part of the phenomenology of writing.’ Like a number of writers (I’m thinking of Peter Riley with Nicholas Moore) he has re-examined the reviled 1940s to find a significant writer who was eclipsed by the Movement Orthodoxy: in Crozier’s case, J.F. Hendry, whom he praises for negotiating politics at the level of experience, ‘the work of a complex, absorptive mind’. But his piece on Roy Fisher’s A Furnace negotiates the readings of Donald Davie on Fisher’s early work and sees a materialist mysticism in Fisher’s ‘making of identities through the action of signs when not subjected to authority, the authority above all of time.’ It might be a little too easy to say that this describes Crozier’s work too, but there is clearly a relationship between Fisher’s domestic phenomenological defamiliarisations and Crozier’s ‘day to day bonheur’ that evades (or ignores) the canon.

Robert Sheppard

 

Link to original publication here:           

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/April%202012/Andrew%20Crozier.shepp.htm

 

 

             

ReViews 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher, edited by Andrew Duncan, Shearsman Books. 

[This review was first published as ‘The Marvels of Lambeth’ (Allen Fisher), Stride (web), August 2013]

Some books of literary interviews make perfect sense on their own. By coincidence on my desk I have Scott Thurston’s quartet of interviews with four women poets, Talking Poetics, alongside this new book of statements and interviews by Allen Fisher, The Marvels of Lambeth. Thurston’s volume uses interviews conducted knowingly for the purpose of the book, but he fastidiously footnotes everything necessary and there are useful bibliographies at the back. You could learn a lot about the work of these writers from the interviews and paratexts alone. The Marvels of Lambeth doesn’t operate like that at all. I doubt whether a new reader should start here. (I’d advise waiting for The Portable Allen Fisher volume out later this year from Shearsman.) Part of this has to do with editing. Andrew Duncan, a fine poet and exhaustive commentator on innovative British poetry, is the editor and chief interviewer. Unlike Thurston, he is hands-off with footnotes, although he does pop up now and then with italicised parenthetical remarks, a little like Basil Fawlty arriving at your restaurant table just as you are about to taste the starter.

Actually, the starter to this volume is a playful cut-up text ‘Preface by Sir Aylmer Firebrace to original 1909 Everyman Edition of Prosyncel’. This won’t help much either. Fisher scholars like me know that Prosyncel was a teasing volume from the mid-70s which presented cross-sections of Fisher’s 37 creative projects of the time. More usefully, at the end of this book are sections taken from Prosyncel about the by no means straightforward structure of the long loco-specific project Place that Fisher wrote in the 1970s. The earliest statements, talks and interviews date from the 1970s, with Eric Mottram, Peter Barry and Ken Edwards (heavyweights all three). There is only one from the 1980s, with Adrian Clarke, when Fisher had begun his other long project Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. (Place was published entire by Reality Street in 2005 and is 414 pages long; Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, whose title enacts its interest in morphology, its tendency to pattern-making and textual distortion, was written between 1982 and 2005 and its total 750 pages are now available as a trilogy: Gravity and Leans from Salt and Entanglement from The Gig. They are alternative places for the newcomer to start, though there are other projects to check out, including Fisher’s visual art practice which is increasingly impacting upon his writing.) Many of the other interviews – with Scott Thurston, Victoria Sheppard, and those with Duncan – date from around the end of the period of work on Gravity. What you get is snapshots of forty years of development from the conceptual poetics of 1973 (Fisher was involved with a Fluxus offshoot, Fluxshoe) to his mature poetics of imperfect fit and confidence in lack (to which I shall return). Between, you perceive him wrestling with the question of procedural writing and responsibility: should one intervene in writing systems one has set up or not. The later poetics involves setting up systems (via multiple quotations and writing) and interventions (to sometimes sculpt the material and sometimes to disrupt it, or to do both), in order to constantly surprise himself and the reader, to activate the reader and make him or her productive with the text. Cutting, cut-up, and collage have always seemed slightly inadequate words for what Fisher now calls ‘imperfect fit’, which suggests that his ‘collaging’ is not a synonym for ‘quilting’, but you have to start with those terms to explain the workings of the work. (I came up with the term ‘creative linkage’ in my own poetics and critical work to show how texts like Fisher’s are simultaneously disjoined and enjoined.) He speaks of an attitude he calls in a recent poetics piece ‘confidence in lack’, a kind of update of Keats’ negative capability that allows the writer (and possibly the reader, if they absorb the poetics as readerly action) to admit disparity, dissonance, and noise to the poem. In the interview with Scott Thurston, Fisher describes this cautiously in a more homely metaphor borrowed from Charles Olson: ‘I’d also say something like leave the dirt on…. That, of course, also means because we’re all artificers, we don’t leave all the dirt on. It’s very selective about that, but you’re putting signifiers in which indicate lapse or change.’

There is much to comment on in these exchanges, which I don’t have room for here. Scientific ideas are entertained as contents or structural homologies for the work; poetic community and publishing become important, and important as extensions of one another. One interview is specifically about performance. Another is on creative process (you can almost hear the files being rustled open for the interviewer to peer inside). Duncan and Fisher in their exchanges range freely over most of this territory, but occasionally focus upon particular texts, so that his theory of ‘riming’ is demonstrated for the reader, for example.

For me, Fisher’s early involvement with Fluxus is of some contemporary interest. There is much discussion these days about ‘conceptual writing’; it is interesting to see the term being freely entertained (and finally discarded, or more accurately, absorbed into a growing poetics of processual advancement). Fisher discusses this in terms that I’m sure he would not disagree with now: ‘The meaning of my art is the use it may have. Cage’s sense of utility. A way of helping out, as well as the fact that all art, every act in life is a political act.’  ‘But that isn’t conceptual,’ the interviewer, the possibly pseudonymous R.A.C. Kiss, cuts in. ‘I didn’t say it was,’ Fisher concludes the interview, decisively, but also humorously as he dodges questions and thinks out loud (as he continues to do throughout the years of interrogatory discourse documented here, still with this characteristic humour). In a later interview with Duncan, Fisher talks about his spanner in the works poetics of self-interruption and compares it to the sudden ‘honking’ of Albert Ayler’s free jazz. ‘I’m just wondering if I should footnote Albert Ayler,’ muses Duncan. ‘In what way?’ Fisher asks, not following the editorial imperative. Duncan explains: ‘There is a famous paradox, which is that if you set out to explain your poetry by explaining bits, you rapidly end up with 80 pages of prose to one page of poetry. And you realise, This was not the right way to go at all! A lot of people reading this have no idea who Albert Ayler was.’ ‘No I know,’ Fisher replies, seeming to get it, but then with the typical excitement that Fisher shows for ideas and art manifestations, he’s off on one: ‘Except, you know there’s a new box set coming out?... I think it’s about 8 CDs, it’s the whole of his work.’ At its best, this book captures Fisher’s infectious enthusiasm, ceaseless curiosity, for ‘all art and every act in life’. In a funny sort of way, it’s this that best ‘explains’ the multi-referentiality of his work (though more footnotes might still have been useful).

Robert Sheppard

I've written about Allen Fisher on this blog a lot: here's one substantial post: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Proposals by Allen Fisher 

8 Sept 1976:The Day I went to Brighton and the end of political dreams

The Day I went to Brighton and the end of political dreams

This diary entry (a kind of distant cousin to the last one on 30s poets posted here on its 50^th anniversary: Pages: June 1976 Memories of Empson, Spender, Gascoyne and Rickword at the University of East Anglia ) was quite important to me. Although I was a bit of a self-satisfied prick, I came back to this entry several times over the years to fictionalise it, or use it, but now it seems interesting in its own right. Some arguments – about the rise of fascism, about the function of education – don’t seem to go away. For me personally, it is one of the few representations of my father and myself talking.

8^th September 1976. Wednesday: the Day I went to Brighton to buy some paper... [that would be paper for my duplicator, perhaps to print one of my early pamphlets, probably Triptych and other poems, of which I still have copies!]

Ambling around, I walked into a bookshop in a plush chain store book shop to browse around. I caught sight of Richard Neville’s Playpower, a book I have been wishing to obtain for some time to place with [Jeff] Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, [Iain] Sinclair’s Kodak Mantra Diaries, Palmer’s The Trials of Oz and, of course, my cherished copies of Oz, Other Scenes and Sub ’70. [All of which I still have.] It seems ironical to buy it here and not from the Public House or Symposium, or from Bill Butler’s now three-year defunct Unicorn bookshop, where I bought those ‘underground’ magazines. I would have been 15 then, naively soaking up the cliches of an ‘alternative’ society that was already defeated, betrayed; that is, I was younger then than the school kids who – in the wisdom of public prosecutors’ minds – were possibly perverted by the obscenities they themselves produced! But 1970 seems a long time ago.

I go to sit on the seafront to await my father. Today the TUC are meeting at the Dome. I have just wandered through the aftermath of a demonstration. Only a few people remain arguing; a man carries a portrait of Chairman Mao. Lots of young people are now peacefully walking the promenade, dressed in fluorescent orange jackets that have ‘The Right to Work’ printed on them. ‘Bully boys,’ The Sun calls them. A policewoman in her attractive uniform which makes her look like an air hostess, follows three protesting girls cautiously, whispering into her radio. ‘The underground has abolished work,’ the book says. Somehow in six years the demand for the right NOT to work, to play, to transform work into play, has been superseded by the plea for the right to work. There has been a very distinct angry, political 1930s feeling growing since the end of 1973 when, when unemployment – regarded as a relatively historic institution when I started studying A Level Economics in September of the previous year –had escalated, and Edward Heath was forcing the country to dark streets, power cuts (except over Christmas), three day weeks, in order to confront the miners, finally leading to the election in February 1974. I remember the horror of finding that all my school friends were not staunch labourites, and even I voted Liberal, pissed out of my brains in a hotel room in Whitley Bay, in the middle of an Economics field trip to the then highly politicised Northeast. What happened to the ‘underground’ in that year? The Pink Floyd, the heads’ freak-out band, produced Dark Side of the Moon, their pretentious melange of everything from Thoreau to RD Laing, twee [illegible] of the word ‘bullshit’, and Mike Oldfield produced Tubular Bells, the two hit albums to be found in the rooms of every young person in 1973 who was waiting for somebody to actually offer them a real dope. [I had copies of both albums!] Certain members of the ‘underground’ press turned up at this time, in the offices of IPC’s New Musical Express. Virgin Records, up Portobello Yard, with its out of work model secretaries and hangers-on with transatlantic accents adding to the air of inefficiency, launched pothead music into outer space. [I had visited the headquarters referred to in order to promote the cassette poetry magazine 1983, so this was observed.] Festivals dope exchange for weak tea. [Doubtful reading.]

Of course, ‘things have changed’ because of the 60s, even my mother agrees to that. A black man and a white woman stroll the prom without stares following them, and the gays from The New Hart and Hand are not so ‘weird; as they were. Etcetera. I leave the list to the social historians of the 1960s. But we seem to have stopped, like a ball that has cascaded down one valley wall: we are beginning to roll backwards as we try to ascend the other without fresh momentum. ‘Keep on to the 1980s, Motherfuckers!’ seems a joke. The latent fascism of the hippies who con off straights has the same punch as a policeman beating a black, whether in Johannesburg or Notting Hill, and the ultimate reduction of this is David Bowie’s well publicised claim to wish to be Britain’s first fascist Prime Minister. [Not quite so well-publicised, in fact. It was in an interview in NME, Berlin years.] And he means it. The streets are tougher at night. Beer-bleary unemployed are looking for skulls to crack. Rather than turning to the left, the British public, well trained by Heath and his forebears to rally round the sorry flag, unmoved by any refreshing breeze, against ‘anarchy’, or whatever it calls any force dedicated to destroy the present in order to build a future – they are turning to the right. (NF vote 1974:      ). [This note appears without the statistic; it mimes a line or two in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] The failure to realise that the change going on inside the heads of the hippies was not happening beyond them, led to an acidic complacency. The 1000 demonstrators before the Dome knew they each individually have the power to do nothing. Only together do they push against the gates. That is the first lesson of the next stage to be learned, before it happens. Now. The dream is the architect’s plan not the finished building, furnishings and all. Individually (the Jan Palack thing aside for a while), they are no more significant than the geriatric holiday makers who saunter around here, these people the acid failed to reach, the straights in that mythology, or rather those mythologies. I look into the sallow eyes next to me. We can’t look strangers in the eye and say ‘Hello’, and to do so is only a Dada shock gesture like spitting in their eyes. And who can say now without assurance that two hippie girls met in 1968 would grow up to marry a bank manager?

My father arrives and we head home. I see Jackie, an old school friend, waiting for a bus. Alarmingly, just past their 20th birthdays whole handfuls of old friends are getting married, as if that were the only possible next step in the Monopoly board of life. No ‘chance’ cards (‘You have left the game. Try not to go to gaol!’) It’s a well-rehearsed sequence to follow; it puts so many things into focus. It’s comfortable and it’s a Cornice in Purgatory. Even L, who once cherished dreams of becoming this particular poet’s ‘mistress’, [I bet she didn’t really!] has embraced the middle class life surrogate of matrimony as her inescapable fate. She is not powerful enough to break out of the shell with her own energies, and the necessary catalysts in the outside world, whether that is just a label or a hero, are lacking. Nobody is freaking out in bubble baths or fucking in the streets! I remember her conditioned abhorrence when I told her I’d got high, ‘I didn't think that you would... etcetera...’ It’s pretty certain she’s knitting socks in her semi detached Cornice. It is now 10 years since the early stages of the ‘underground’ revolution and we’re waiting for the next stage to save those of us (and they are ‘us’, not just ‘them’) who can’t break free or free enough of their parents’ expectations, the next battering at the Bastille gates that will quite never quite topple. Nobody’s shivering in the night because of the bomb, and nobody wants to tirelessly play their way to heaven, but where are the dots that we must join together to make the new picture? Is this the FIRST chapter of my generation’s or the next generation’s ‘bomb culture’, to realise what is waiting is the first step to the finding; to search is the second.

We pass My old school, a turquoise and glass box, on our left, Kings Manor School. My father asks me casually if I’d want to be back there, as he sees me peering broadsides at it. I say I wouldn’t, carefully, so as not to stress the absurdity of the notion. At the TUC Congress a delegate has suggested that school children should be taught how to spend their time on the dole. The school system is so geared to employment that play or leisure or self-development or social life (insert your own definition of the vital things you should be doing between 5:00 to 9:00) is viewed by the legions of the fresh work monomaniacs it produces every year as a waste of time, that can only be filled with frustrated destruction. Painting is OK for five year olds, but not for school leavers. Leave the full time dabbling in non productive activities until you retire. [Ironic!] You either have to join the bandwagon or drop out. Most today are joining the bandwagon, a bandwagon that can’t quite support them, despite their crazed affection for it. All I ask is a little sanity to be able to carve out one’s own empire, neither in nor out, neither wholly one nor wholly another.

I say this reminds me of when he picked me up last year when I was working for Sealink in the publicity caravan. [See photo of me here: Pages: Dream Diary Friday 19 September 1975  ]My father tells me that F, the guy who’s doing it this year, for the solace of sunshine and fresh air throughout the summer, [remember: it was a heatwave!] has let girls get promoted above him. He tells me that he’s being paid less than I got, and I am suddenly shocked when I realise that my A Levels allowed me to be paid more than somebody who’d worked for some time, like his father before him, at the port [Newhaven Harbour].

Over dinner my father suggests journalism as a possible future career for an English graduate. I try not to choke and mutter something about it being a mug’s game. ‘Spiritually a bad bag’ is what I'm thinking, but I can't quite quote that across the table. [That too is in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] ‘When you get out there in the world,’ (note work = the world) ‘you’ll find that nearly everything is a mug’s game! Therefore, the whole of existence is. He knows that's not true! ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Library,’ I offer abstractly. ‘Is that well paid?’ he asks pointedly. I say I don’t know, trying to give the impression that I’m not even slightly bread-headed, even though I have a pretty good idea about salaries....

 

9th of September 1976: Chairman Mao died today. He left no political successor. There is speculation as to whether this was deliberate. Was he hoping for another resurgence from grassroots level, another regenerative Cultural Revolution, as experienced in 1968? the commentators ask.

[Rough note that seems to belong to this entry:] Tzara had the sense to kill Dada before the rot set in, before the instrument was blunted, appropriated by those it should be driven into, like a stake into a vampire’s heart.

ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Here's the second review I'm republishing on this blog. You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Glancing Off 

Tom Raworth, As When: A Selection. Ed. Miles Champion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN 978 1 78410 033 0, £14.99.

Tom Raworth, XIVLiners. Brighton: Sancho Panza, 2014. 224 pp. ISBN 978 1 910501 00 9, £10.

Tom Raworth, Structure from Motion. Washington DC: Edge, 2015. 75pp. ISBN 978 1 890311 44 5.

[This review was first published as ‘Glancing Off’ (Raworth), Poetry Salzburg Review 28, Autumn 2015, and was an attempt to write casually about Tom Raworth’s work, i.e., to not to try to theorise it too much, apart from what I could remember from writing about the work in The Poetry of Saying and elsewhere. Hence my opening sentence. Here's another elsewhere, with further elsewheres: Pages: Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes]

 

 

Elsewhere, I write about Tom Raworth’s work as an exemplar of a ‘poetry of saying’, with its eternally signifying play, its lack of closure. I contrast this with ‘the poetry of the said’, which involves fixity (the dreariness of anecdotage, in particular). But the two qualities are deeply intertwined: even slippery Raworth poems demand the fixity of reprinting them again and again in the same words, as in his As When: A Selection and two attendant volumes, XIVLiners and Structure from Motion, the last containing recent work. While I believe my thesis still, as literary critical description and writerly poetics, it doesn’t help new readers of these poems much. You need to ‘get’ them first, otherwise the critical concepts are simply a shield, its terms jargon to fend off unmediated encounter. 

I probably first read Raworth in the Penguin Modern Poets series in the trio Ashbery, Harwood, Raworth. Ashbery then was not the eminent figure he is today; I found the poems playful and enigmatic. Harwood I’d already read (and later worked on his poetry). But there was something in Raworth’s notational, throwaway, skeletal, constantly shifting writing (the lack of punctuation and the insistent lower case the only constants) that I felt was escaping me, not like the difficulties one has in reading the effervescent but deep resonances of Rilke or Celan, for example, but something more basic: like having registered X out of the corner of my eye but not quite seeing it wholly or clearly enough. Sufferers from migraines get used to something like this – and so do readers of Raworth, who have to accept a certain negative capability, to return to a state where we don’t know anything. As Raworth said, in an interview quoted in Miles Champion’s detailed biblio-biographic introduction to As When: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge... My idea is to go the other way... And to be completely empty and see what sounds.’ And so, it seems to me, must the reader. As Raworth says in the creative work itself: ‘not rejecting knowledge but what (as in research) passes for knowledge and is but an illusion. the words (knowledge, intelligent, etc.) must be redefined, or new words coined.’  

Part of this has to do with the lack of method – or disarming simplicity of method. Early works simply add new lines to past lines until they stop. Olson spoke of one perception leading immediately to another, but we find not just perceptions (they could be puns or linguistic coinages, plenty of over-heard or found language, not to mention diagrams or doodles). One early poem enacts its own telling and simply happens in a situated on-going process:

 

I made this pact, intelligence

shall not replace intuition, sitting here

my hand cold on the typewriter

 

Later works juggle within line limits, as I shall show. But the poesis is always intuitive, one intuition leading to the next. Raworth is very seldom procedural (and when he is, the procedure is only used once). Apprehension of a poetry of saying can only come after a successful aesthetic encounter with the work, in the ‘event-act’ of reading, as Derek Attridge calls it, intuition before tuition.

As When is a selection that stretches Raworth’s whole career, from the early sixties until now, but is by no means even in coverage. The first half of the book presents a clear narrative of Raworth’s development of perceptual registers of life’s odd simultaneity, though not necessarily its complexity. ‘Morning’ and ‘Three’ enact domestic life as semi-orchestrated chaos. Anybody who looks after children will recognise: ‘smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand’, the first of 7 action-packed lines of ‘Three’ that end with the temporary harmony of ‘they go down the hall all carrying something’. I say ‘not complexity’, because complexity implies order and Raworth’s poems share something with the contemporaneous anarchistic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend with its ‘anything goes’ and his stand ‘against method’. When perceptions are adjoined by fantasy and linguistic games, as in the playful opening of ‘Wedding Day’ (‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’), the very poem in which he made the ‘pact’ regarding intuition, though with whom is not clear, the reader has to go with the unknown flow (or not). To read the work as a witty super-charged stream of consciousness isn’t a bad way in. My students often say this and I then encourage them to develop a better sense of stream, because consciousness co-exists with other streamed qualities. Fragmentary fictional scenarios are just as likely to jump into view (‘we were leaving on a journey by slow aeroplane’) as the perceptions of our poet at stool, where the anticipated stream probably isn’t consciousness:

 

between my legs i read

 

levi stra

                        origina

            quality clo

 

                                    leaning too far forward

            into a patch of sunlight,

 

or his wide-eyed quotidian but peculiarly inessential queries (‘where do all the cigarette ends go?’), or even his accurate registering of language in production, as in the voice (in ‘Love Poem’) that begins: ‘there have been so many other men in my pause life’. Humour, of course, is what carries the reader here; there is something in the human covenant that grants humour and wit exclusive rights over our intellect (it is an intellectual function that undermines itself).

I want to dwell on ‘gone to lunch back in five minutes’, the opening section of ‘The University of Essex’. Raworth was briefly student and staff member there, after years away from education and its fossilized ‘knowledge’, though the poem itself suggests he registers his distance still, as in the third line’s ‘no and no’:

 

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no 

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

 

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

 

it is a long coat and van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes        the Arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

 

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

 

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam

 

Many of these early poems abound with questions about self (as in the speculation about metabolism and muscles) but a growing area of enquiry is about writing itself. In this poem questions about the line are both existential and technical for the poet. A sketchy sense of location, though often surreal in its detail, as in the ambiguous threads in the equally ambiguous square, segues into the astonishing vision of the police band, in a parenthetical aside that opens but doesn’t close before the final, sinister, image. Although it offers what looks like closure, this phrase cannot be held responsible, as it were, for the almost liminal consciousness (not arranged in a ‘stream’) of dislocated yellow, hammers and drills.

In the 1970s the poems become more self-conscious with Raworth’s self-confessed stretching towards the long poem, and some of the longer poem sequences seem to be deliberately ‘tracking’ – to use the title of one of them – its possibilities: ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long poem everyone is straining for?’ he asks. However, he isn’t about to commit The Four Quartets. He answers his own question with a poetics statement that he characteristically partly registers as a question and places in parentheses: ‘(the synopsis is enough for a quick mind now (result of film?) – you can’t pad out the book).’  Implicit is celerity of mind as writerly and readerly modes, the montage techniques of Jean-Luc Godard or Jeff Keen being the apposite filmic analogies. ‘Tracking (notes)’ itself is a serial poem-and-prose piece that juggles poetics and ‘philosophy’ (the remarks on ‘knowledge’ quoted earlier come from this work), as when Raworth usefully tells us ‘the true direction is always glancing off’, presented alongside examples of that ‘glancing’ itself: ‘saddle of hare?’ one section reads entirely, as if questioning collective nounhood. Another sequence, ‘Stag Skull Mounted’, a notational diary poem, tracks its own (eventual) failure as method, its exhaustion: the final entry is ‘this trick doesn’t work’, at which point the process must be abandoned. As a later interview has it, which modifies and extends the metaphor of ‘glancing off’: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people ... other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’

One aspect of Raworth’s work that we don’t get in As When is most of the long poems that Raworth did achieve in the late 1970s and early 1980s (they are literally long in their short-lined, occasionally one word, measures down the page) like Writing and Catacoustics, since Champion, probably wisely, didn’t want to excerpt. (They can be found in the 2003 Carcanet Collected Poems.) This is the perfect form for an on-going, digressive tracking of ‘anything goes’, an additive non-method, but is a rollercoaster for the reader who must stay with it, understanding or not. This process is also reflected in Raworth’s famous ‘quick mind’ recitation style. However, Champion selects ‘West Wind’, the poem I think of as the last of this series, and a personal favourite, because it combines the perceptual and linguistic play of earlier work with a political commitment that derives (accidentally?) from having been written during the 1983 British election when Raworth’s mother was in hospital. It combines social observation recorded nowhere else (‘if I can’t take the dog in/ I won’t vote’), with savage political comment about Thatcher (‘handbag’). The Falklands War is brilliantly equated with poverty at home and ‘the state as/ the status/ quo’: 

 

puffs of unrelated news

restore

our former glory

which apparently

was a global servant class

too poor

to see the crown jewels

 

Yet these quotations from the flow do violence to the experience of the tickertape flicker of the poem’s progress, jumping and cutting, from these moments of political acuity to perceptually disturbing data, such as ‘fragments/ of black spider motion’ with which the poem ends. To Raworth’s question, ‘result of film?’ we must answer, ‘Yes.’

Another deliberate gap in the Champion selection is the extraordinary series of 211 fourteen line poems that Raworth wrote between about 1986 and the mid-1990s, but these are published collectively in XIVLiners for the first time. Beautifully designed, with one poem per page, we can savour each in isolation, in this pocket-book edition. If we are invited by the book’s title to think of them as sonnets, then the punning cover, Raworth’s own, showing 14 ocean liners, gently pushes away from that identification, with a joking raspberry of a foghorn. If they are sonnets, as I’ve said elsewhere, then they display a volta (the ‘turn’ that occurs asymmetrically at some point, usually after line 8 or 10 in the traditional sonnet frame) after every line. In contrast to the additive long poems, these lyrics are ‘juggled’, the constraint of the frame allowing for tight combinational play, but no less intuitive for that. Although Raworth always confounds identifications, many of the poems seem to be assembled from one source, by taking fragments from a text and putting back the often enigmatic fragments in a new order, to present a ‘glancing off’ meaning that was not present in the original, a kind of literary cubism. There is no typical poem but it is helpful to take an example:         

 

tear away whole sections

of what is good

bags of camel’s hair

a blue that carries further

the unlikeness of dusk and chaos

crossing a stream

where tributaries enter a river

you can’t wait for science

to drain that space of wet earth dry

the face seemed to lack contour

nothing is left but a vast expanse

deep grooves of habit

trodden into the soil

under a full moon crossed by a vulture

 

It doesn’t matter that the source is a geography book (and it might not help to identify it). What matters is that the syntactic indeterminacy of the piece, the difficulties we have making sense of it (we are hard-wired for that, and can’t just leave it alone), create a kind of unfinishable reading. Is line 2 connected to line 3, thus changing the meaning? What kind of ‘face’ is it? ‘Deep grooves of habit’ might be metaphorical rather than real but they are still ‘trodden into the soil’, in a location ‘under a full moon’ that promises nocturnal rest, but the ‘vulture’ in the last line seems ominous, despite the ordinary specificity of ‘camel’s hair’, ‘stream’, ‘tributaries’ and ‘river’. The semantic field traceable between these words even allows you to say what the poem is ‘about’, what matter they encircle. But none of the poems seems to close; indeed, they read differently on re-encounter. You can’t remember them, often.  This is what I mean by a ‘poetry of saying’: the poems inaugurate an eternality of utterance (one of their first printings was entitled ‘Eternal Sections’). This book could remain in and out of your pocket forever.

This vertiginous negative capability, best learnt with these fourteen liners, is necessary in encountering Raworth’s recent work, represented in the final pages of As When and in Structure from Motion, a title that suggests its poetics. The long poem ‘Got On’ which appears in both books, is a strikingly new departure, its stuttering lineation impeding reading and offering almost aggressive resistance: ‘fuck the friendly image’ it begins before collecting as much of what is glancing off as it can: names, fragments of speech, political analysis, and even the headline-like: ‘hearings reveal ineffable blood warmth’. (I admit to be still reading this text.) ‘Spear Shaking’, in contrast, is an egregious and technically-adroit example of Raworth’s one-off procedural works, using a technique that the Oulipo calls ‘The Chimera’, but which, in Raworth’s witty ways, is more like the ‘one song to the tune of another’ game on the Radio 4 anti-panel show ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (an analogy that is appropriate to the very English nature of Raworth’s humour). Richard III’s most famous speech (as re-diffused by Shakespeare) is populated with items from a keyword-list used by the US security services to track online chatter, but we can still discern the lilt of the original: ‘Now is the power outrage of our weapons cache/ Made toxic jihad by this breach of threat.’ This contemporary map of fears is an appropriate example to round off this review of over sixty years of intuitive and intelligent exploration of periphery vision, of showing where the action is, beyond ‘knowledge’.

 

Robert Sheppard

July 2015

ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

I am going to post eight reviews written a number of years ago and published in now difficult to come by volumes. This post will also form a hubpost to access the other seven when they are all posted.

 Here's the first anyway, on this page! Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4, Winter 2010, eds. Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. ISSN 2152-9841.

Number 2: Three books of poetry by Tom Raworth: Pages: ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Number 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews and Statements by Allen Fisher: Pages: ReViews 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher

Number 4: The Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton: Pages: ReView 4: An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton

[This first review was the shortest, I think. and was published as ‘Mimeo Memes’ (Mimeo Mimeo), Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 4 (1), March 2012.]

The fourth edition of Mimeo Mimeo – a magazine with an associated blog at 

www.mimeomimeo.blogspot.com [still there, 2026] 

 – celebrates the little magazines and small presses of the British Poetry Revival. Brief editorial matter puts this ‘movement’ in the past tense and one contributor, Ken Edwards, wonders at the temporal limits of this term. It was propagated (though not originated) by Eric Mottram, and he was quite clear: it ended in 1975. (What happened during the last twenty years of his life?) We are subjected to three of Mottram’s letters and one postcard to Jeff Nuttall from mid-period BPR (1966) which Mottram uses to record his experiences of American culture on an exchange year: he is exposed to everything from Sun Ra to youth culture (‘Dylan, Bob not Thomas’, he explains slyly, alluding to Nuttall’s respect for the poetic 1940s). He meets Rothenberg and Blackburn, and others. But his main ire is vented against Ambit magazine back home for its editorial meddling in the publication of Nuttall’s poems.

            Editorial independence is the raison d’etre of small presses, by contrast, and veteran publisher Ken Edwards offers a succinct overview of British poet-led activity such as Gael Turnbull’s Migrant or Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum, presses which took chances and generally didn’t meddle. The nostalgic whiff of browned paper and faint ink, the tear of rusty staples on the palms, is evoked by such bibliographic openheartedness (for those who were around), and the democratic device of the list presents publishers and poets on a level playing field for once. Edwards updates us into an era in which his own Reality Street has lost ‘Editions’ from its title but has gained Print On Demand and the internet (two major printing technologies not otherwise examined here).

            In a generous interview Tom Raworth skips around Outburst, Matrix, Goliard, Cape Goliard and other publishing enterprises he was involved with, reminding us that poets, in order to get publishing to happen, would have to learn to typeset, collect type, etc. The spirit of cooperation between poets and between publishers (often the same people of course) was essential: Piero Heliczer and Asa Benveniste are both mentioned in this respect, along with Raworth’s associate Barry Hall who carried on longer than Raworth running a small press (Goliard) in association with a larger one (Cape) until he could stand the compromise no longer. Hall walked out (literally) on the print room and never returned.

            In another interview, Trevor Winkfield is dragged through the past by the insistent Miles Champion (a discoverer of many a dark corner of our lost publishing legacies), from his early interest in Schwitters (he buys the Stefan Themerson book with pocket money although Gaberbocchus, Themerson’s press, is not commented on further), through to discovering Ashbery and Mathews in London and editing his own magazine Juillard. His off-hand account of giving copies away and his sense that a magazine has a limited life span – it’s over once you’ve published everybody who interests you, the magazine a personal anthology – is a sober reminder of the sheer non-commercial and eclectic nature of some editing.

            The third interview, with poet-publisher (and much more) David Meltzer, opens: ‘What do you want to know?’ It’s a good question. We pass through interesting territory, about listening to recordings of poetry (another story really, Dylan, not Bob, this time). There’s a pitch for Kenneth Patchen’s reputation. There’s one curious comment about small press publishing that sounds as though it ought to be true: ‘There’s always this inverse ratio between a really beautiful book and generally crappy poetry.’ Drop into the archive, as Richard Price does in his piece, and you’ll find that there are very few absolutes like this. Price worries over definitions (and therefore bibliographic exclusions) that he and David Miller devised for an authoritative survey of little magazines, concerning periodicity and the extent of commerciality. Encounter with its CIA funding makes an alarming case study. Despite these concerns there is much wisdom in the piece in reminding us that there is a real history of 1940s and 1960s poetry in magazine archives, and that magazines often achieve posthumous success (and fame) outweighing their contemporary failure. How many of us, while regularly acknowledging the importance of them, have seen a copy of Migrant or early copies of AND (Bob Cobbing’s magazine that managed 11 issues during his long life-time, and one or two posthumous ones, which again raises problems for the inventors of inventories and taxonomies)? Price also reminds us of how editing plays a strong role in subsequent careers, Raworth’s not least of all. Bill Griffiths, more than most, integrated writing and publishing, and Alan Halsey writes of the way some of Griffiths’ works transmogrify between ‘editions’. (I have two copies of his Spook Book with completely different contents!) This kind of playful processual necessity makes for a bibliographic nightmare which Halsey had to live through, co-editing the Reality Street Early Collected Poems, and his account here re-dresses the balance of the loss of the sheer physical trace of Griffiths on the original low-tech booklets and fascicles, in favour of uniform type, in that otherwise wonderful volume. [See below for more on Bill Griffiths.]

            Another poet-publisher who appears throughout several accounts is Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press. Indeed, the issue opens with his Kabbalistic poetics essay ‘Language: Enemy, Pursuit,’ (1980) which feels out of place until you realise that ‘the black fire on white Fire’ of letter-press printing is part of his poesis, as he faces the bareness of word, the metaphysics of type, watching all that language falling to pieces, then thrown back together as a page of a book. I returned to Benveniste’s excellent selected poems Throw Out the Life Line Lay Out the Corse (1983) and wondered whether the impaction of the sequence ‘Dense Lens’ derived not just from a reading of Zukofsky but from the experience of typesetting sections of A for Trigram.

            Mimeo Mimeo 4 traces not just a fashionable materiality but (something that could survive the e-book revolution) the extraordinary author-designer-publisher-printer relationship (even if conducted within one person), the means by which books (and occasionally the poems in them) come into being. This extended poesis of the physical medium ultimately leads outwards into communities of readers (elites and wide networks alike) and in doing so makes innovative contemporary poetries signal their very contemporaneity.

Robert Sheppard

I write about Bill Griffiths' self-publication(s) here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: small presses part two: Bill Griffiths The Book of the Boat and Collected Poems and Sequences

 

A Review of Peter Finch’s The Literary Business in Tears in the Fence AND the poetry of John Tripp.

Tears in the Fence 84 is out and I have a review of The Literary Business by Peter Finch (Parthian, 2025) in it. More of that in a moment. This issue is shot through with the elegiac: the lives of JH Prynne, Jeremy Hooker, and Ric Hool are remembered. A review of Frances Presley recalls her recalling (re-calling) of Gavin Selerie and Anthony Mellors. Another review of Frances' work is offered in memory of Tilla Brading. (As I type these names I realise I knew them all. See below.) But these are just first impressions. I see I've got a poem or two by Kelvin Corcoran to look forward, and Mark Goodwin's work jumps off the page... 

 

DETAILS HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/ (for a while)

 

SUBSCRIBE HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/

Now to John Tripp.

In my review I comment: ‘I know I will return to the book for further reference.’ And I will again, but the first effect of the book, after I'd filed my copy, was to notice the poetry of John Tripp. As I say, responding to Finch’s chapter entitled ‘John Tripp’: ‘John Tripp helped Finch’s early publishing, and with that arduous reviewing [in the editing of Second Aeon]. He otherwise exhibited “excess, diatribe, antisocial drink-driven outrage, minor larceny, insulting conduct”, but was a fine poet (making the final Penguin Modern Poets even though ‘his work is now fading fast into the dust of the last century’). Finch matches his account with two fine memorial poems of his own for “JT”.’ This sent me hunting, not for the man himself (a picture of him in a sombrero accompanies the chapter, and he bears a considerable resemblance to comedian Roy Hudd, even in the photograph below!) but for the poems.

I bought his Selected Poems published by Seren in 1989, three years after his death. I wasn’t disappointed. The mood is often grim, the Wales he commemorates is a rainy land that imperialism has scraped the veneer from, though time and again he recreates events of Welsh history in imagistic form, and not Welsh history only: ‘young men skewered and skulls smashed-in by butts./It is Flint, Culloden, Connemara.’ The tone is elegiac (that word again), bitter, but never hopeless (unless he’s talking about himself, but that’s self-dramatising). Despite the ubiquitous rain (‘There is downpour, always,/ as the carriages inch into Newport’ the first poem opens!) the familial home offers: ‘In summer a shock orange sunball/ shatters the trellis.’  

‘The Lost Girls’ is a meditation upon ‘maids and skivvies’ abused by their employers; he presents one: ‘the thrust of an empire behind him,/ the confidence of rich stags’. I particularly liked the final contribution, ‘Living Under Thatcher’, a sequence of 10 poems: ‘The old man asks for free burnt crackling/ off the cold pork, and is refused.’ That seems the apposite image for the era. There’s more to say about Tripp (the poems about David Jones, about Turner, about other writers, about the Second World War) but I’ll leave it for now. And recommend others to discover (or re-discover) his work.    

 

My previous review for Tears (and poems) are referred to here:  https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/02/one-review-and-two-poems-in-tears-in.html

(I have been a long-time contributor to the magazine, as a creative writer, but have recently taken to writing reviews, which I enjoy, and which I regard as pretty important to the life of the poetry scene, as I say here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-tears-review-of-philip-terrys-dantes.html 

I appear in the book for Ric Hool, mentioned here; there is also a video of one of his last songs: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/01/tributes-to-ric-hool-included-in.html

I remember Gavin Selerie here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/08/remembering-gavin-selerie-and-his-laugh.htm

 

 

 

Launch of Holme Fell (and three other volumes) Bluecoat 8 July 2026 (set list)

You may know that my new poetry book, Holme Fell: a sample of landscapes, a collaboration with the photographer Trev Eales, is now published. (There are lots of posts here.) This hardback volume consists of many colour photographs and texts, beautifully presented to enhance the double reading and viewing experience. The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them. As I said last night: 'The poems are responses to the photographs rather than to the landscape itself. Landscapes have boundaries; photographs have borders.' 

Ian McMillan on Bluesky: ‘So good to experience this meeting of poetry and photography by@robertsheppard.bsky.social and Trev Eales from the always exciting Knives Forks and Spoons Press. “A crackle of purple twiglets/against ice-blue mountains, blue clouds:”’

 

Details here:

Holme Fell : Robert Sheppard (author), : 9781916590243 : Blackwell's

I’ve found that everyone who has seen the book is deeply impressed. I’ve tried to convey its physicality in the video on this blogpost:

 Pages: TREV EALES AND ROBERT SHEPPARD: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes PUBLISHED NOW!

Wed 8 Jul, 7-8.30pm: Trev (showing the images) and me (reading) took part in an evening of live poetry with James Byrne, Jesse Hill, and Chris McCabe. Supported by Liverpool Poetry Space, this event brought together four distinctive voices, each presenting live readings of new and recent work in an intimate setting. Books were for sale! I now have each of the auhtors' books. 

About the readers and books

James Byrne launches his new collection The Banality of Power, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, published by Broken Sleep Books.

Jesse Hill is a transdisciplinary researcher and poet, creating ecologically-rooted projects shaped by seasonal cycles and our queer relationship with the breathing world. They teach Creative Writing at Edge Hill University whilst working on their PhD. A new book is out from Broken Sleep Books, Seedwork (On Breaking Open).

Chris McCabe‘s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He’s the author of six poetry collections - the latest in Hedonism from Nine Arches Press, described by The Guardian as showing ‘the full muscle and gristle of lived language.

Trev Eales & Robert Sheppard

It was a great evening, and I've little energy to describe: how Trev and I showed the images and text; how Jesse read from her new Broken Sleep book Seedwork (On Breaking Open), a calendar of the year, relating to self-discovery concerning ecology and sexuality and the connections between; how Chris read from Hedonism poems about Europe, plus some new poems about Europe, and his and our relation to it; how James effortlessly read quite grim material regarding corporate and societal evil as an organised inhuman and inhumane nexus...

I usually include a set-list, but this one is simply the numbers of the poems I read from the book. If you have the book it might make some sense: 

Holme Fell 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, Hodge Close 2, 3, 4, Holme Fell 27, 28.

We all sold books. This Liverpool Poetry Space is a damned good idea. I was there at the preliminary stages.