I had a splendid week this week.  A fantastic bookshop, specialising in poetry, invited me to supply them with Oyster Catcher (www.oystercatcherpress.com) and Knives Forks and Spoons books.  So, Claire, the dog and I went and had ourselves a pleasant day in Lancaster.  The shop is in the Litfest offices, and you can check it out here: www.litfest.org/the-poetry-bookcase.

It’s a fantastic place, with a coffee bar and artisan beers.  There was also some lovely looking tiramisu on offer.  The bookshop itself was the best I’ve seen outside of Chicago.  So, well worth checking out. 

Unfortunately, the dog gets car sick, so I turned up covered in dog vomit with two boxes of books.  Sarah Hymas, who works there, knew me by reputation, so probably thought it was my own, drunken sick.  It wasn’t though. 

Another nice thing that happened, was S. J. Fowler sent me links to videos of him launching Red Museum at the Blue Bus.  I couldn’t make it down, unfortunately, but I watched it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjl8zRJAxWc & here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eWFJjUH3QU. The second reading is from the Curzon Cinema in Soho.  They’ve got a fantastic bar too, which does some brilliant German beer.  You can sit outside too, which is nice in the summer.

Last week I also published Smartarse, which is an anthology edited by, and featuring, Rupert Loydell. 

Loydell used to run Stride Publications, which, about a decade ago, was my first port of call once Maggie O’Sullivan had opened my eyes to Alternative Poetry at the most amazing gig I had ever attended.  I read as many Stride books as I could get from the library, or borrow from Scott Thurston, and I paid well over the odds for a couple of Stride Research Documents, which were out of print.  If it hadn’t been for Stride I certainly wouldn’t be publishing the sort of poetry I do today.  I’d probably be putting out overlooked Victorian poets, or something. 

Strangely, I never felt compelled to read any of Rupert’s poetry.  However, I put that right recently, and I have assimilated Without (which was written with Peter Gillies) and Gauge into my personal literary canon.  So, in my mind, they are as good as Paradise Lost. 

Smartarse is a declaration of a new poetic aesthetic, which I think makes it very exciting.  This is what Rupert says about this new wave of verse:

The poetry I want at the moment is smartarse: a whirlwind mix of comedy, fiction, collage, free association, confession, bravado, parataxis and storytelling. It uses or may use experimental or linguistically innovative techniques, be rooted in modernism or postmodernism, but maybe not so that you as a reader would notice.

Here are fifteen such authors. There’s no school or movement and most of the authors don’t know each other and wouldn’t want to. It’s my idea to call this poetry Smartarse, too, so don’t blame them.

It seems to me this poetry is rooted in the freedom of young USA writers, who haven’t been involved in the sad poetry wars we’ve seen in Britain. USA writers such as Dean Young and Josh Bell (who were invited to contribute to this anthology), along with many others, have taken techniques, processes, ideas and poetics from anywhere they choose, without anyone arguing whose poetry it is or whether it’s experimental or not. They’ve revisited the lyric, the confessional, post-Poundian and post-Eliot as well as the Black Mountain schools. They’ve looked to Ginsberg as much as Frost, Blackburn and Berryman, the New York school, the second New York school, the Narapo Inistitute, the West Coast, the mid West, to zen and the South.

Of course, the grass is always greener, and my American friends assure me it’s not so rosy over there as it might appear from this side of the fence, but it does seem it’s taken us poets a long time in Britain to recover from arguments about who has control of the duplicator or photocopier, who is a better poet than who, who we should or shouldn’t be reading. Do we care or shall we get on with working with language, with writing and reading, with ‘the real work’?

I hope you will enjoy this robust, readable, self-aware and smartarse poetry.    

And now for the interview:

Rupert, what is a Smartarse?

One online dictionary says 'someone who mouths off to provoke or be funny' which seems close enough. I think there's usually an element of self-deprecation and self-knowing involved, too.

When I was trying to get my head around this new poetic movement you described it as 'Postmodern narrative poetry'. I came to terms with this by conceiving it as a coherent group taking the 'low-cultural' productions of Victorian Manchester performance poets, and reinterpreting them as 'high-cultural' productions. Is this the case? How would you describe it?

Come on, I'm not inventing or naming a movement, I'm trying to compile an anthology of poems that I want to read and enjoy, that seem to fulfil my current [and possibly temporary] poetic concerns and interests. I'm calling it 'post-confessional narrative poetry' now. I think ideas of confession and storytelling are coming back but through a filter of experiment and process/form-based poetry, but again in a knowing and sometimes distanced way. I'm not trying to find the new Sylvia Plath or any other bleeding heart.

People are suggesting that I'm sexist, because I've published a book without any women in it. Was this intentional?

What, did I intend to be sexist? No. I had a couple of women authors on my original list of possible contributors. One declined, the other hasn't written any poems for a couple of years.

I ran my concept past several poet, lecturer and publishing friends who all suggested various authors, of both sexes. In the end the authors in Smartarse are the ones who got selected because of their poetry. I suspect there aren't any children, ethnic minorities, pensioners, Cornish, Native American Indians, Australians or several other distinct groups in the anthology either but - surprise, surprise - no-one is questioning that.

I don't think I really need to be defensive, but I have a long track record of publishing women poets through Stride, in anthologies of women's poetry and in solo collections. In this case it's a male anthology by default, but that isn't the focus of the anthology, it's a by-product. People can read it on their own terms and see what's going on, but reading by statistics and percentages makes no sense at all.

Thanks Rupert.  I’d like to conclude with two poems from the book:

David Briggs

The Devil

likes to appear unannounced when I’m writing.

Mostly, he lounges in my elbow-chair,

legs crooked a-swing on the walnut armrest,

juggling a pantoufle on his hoof;

attempting to banjax my metier

with volleys of nefarious imagery:

the President of Curval’s buttocks

electively whipped to pinkish leather;

Gargantua towelling his fundament

with the neck of a well-downed goose;

the Hanged Man’s ghost-trousered salute;

the Flag of the Mad Mother;

Job smitten with boils the size of cricket balls;

Marsyas flayed to one continuous wound;

Vlad III grinning at his breakfast sanguinello.

All of which, by virtue of this arguably

protracted list, I manage to keep

from contaminating the rest of my oeuvre.

Then he helps himself to my Laphroig,

paces the kelim stroking his whiskers,

proposing argumentae a priori

against the New Formalism,

which is enough to make me cap my pen,

and hurl some Miltonian Kryptonite,

vis. the absurdity of his rebellion

having been merely a futile swipe

at the well-spring of his own being;

and, therefore, guaranteed

(in the impossible event of a win)

of securing nothing but his own annihilation.

He shrugs, offended; sulks in the bathroom.

I hear him mangling, then cursing, the flush.

So, I return to my impossible poem

of the soul’s exchange rate—havering

between a glass of water in the desert

and a desert to keep back the flood.

Nathan Thompson

Harlequin Certainties

              a graphic poem for Peter Warlock

where is my shadow

      down the street a portrait in an attic

            further      black railings remind me of white teeth

through revolving doors laughing

       open sesame to absinthe hollowed closed

            a waiter found      dead in the basement

framed for a suicide he did not commit      newsreel

      he sets out on a new adventure

            blood drip-fed through a backdrop of acid

tonight is new music

      cats on stalks      their eyes dowsing for pedestrians

            moving east now      I would have had I been      later

following the sun      junk painted

      on grainy photographs      meetings

            frostbound      illicit sex in brittle grass

how to move is becoming easier

      no heartbeat                  a melisma

            screwing over a ground      grave open

‘good evening Mr H      you

      remind me of something I would rather forget’

            a fox beats time in a bin outside the window

glass stained red      door bolted from the inside

      how did you            escape

            back-tracking kidneys ticking in a paper bag

heels’ sprung rhythm

      lifting off cape spun tight over a railway bridge

            ‘I should have been in Edinburgh      but      Liverpool      Chelsea’

thank you for dreaming      Moscow is grateful

      symbols and spaces prevent my attendance

            bottled out      lined up in a row

shadowlike and frail      a dim silence

      all I am I cannot hear

            ‘artist guilty of bodysnatching’

almost able to speak      I believe you

      there was once another of me

            knocked dead      tried me      somewhat larger

than human size      the effect of solemn approaches

      but I am here now      and do not remember

            how you brushed my hair      stroked my beard

slicked me up for presentation     

      a mirrored cloak

            closing in on twelve-hour exposure

harlequin certainties      my friend and co-conspirator

      with a tear running down your cheek

            scar a mask of combat      you could never

‘do you live here’      ‘no’

      ‘do you work here’      ‘no’

            I check for scorpions and centipedes under the bed

                  dances of the blind anticipating yesterday

                        I will tell you a story:

“a fool is a man whose angel has gone missing

transforming the world’s matter      objects of contemplation

clutter essentials of the heart      through this family

I have picked glass beads from Tudor rings

authentic blues and reds transformed into

murky exhibitions that become more acute

yearning for the unseen

                                                ‘what we contemplate we become’

a world sometimes called      (sometimes answered)      civilization

getting too big to be written about      the air felt lighter

loneliness and despair      a form of cognition

I am not sure that the intense ego is funny

so I’ve left myself outside

drinking milk with the cat      the city is nearly dark enough

to carry on a few days      a few metres      after

I’ve built my strength      flying further

villainous in a graphic novel      archetypal postures

shivering with the tide      dawn is almost here”  

  

did you like it      follow the narrative

      a body lifting from a body in a dark room

            to view the exhibition      ‘his colleagues tried to get rid of him’

I have remained faithful to your vision

      writing my memoirs in your blood

            to avoid fundamental questions

so over Thames no need for a wherry

      visions of a witch in a pantomime

            could animate these journeys spat at moonlight

revolt and ululation      I wonder sometimes

      how much I wrote      how much he without

            me      I think not much      persistent      small-scale

invocations      conjurations      songs

      in the vapour-trail of a broomstick

            duping the gullible      doting senile      never

a widespread belief in such phenomena

      with sad looks      company to find

            to shake off this act      confirm the spell      King Lud

another position of obscurity      narrative

      I am not able      but am always

            murdered again      was it you

line up the suspects      hats on pegs please

      come clean or risk the underworld’s impotence

            prayer’s unceasing effort in both mathematics and science

widespread scepticism emphasises nature      deemed guilty

      a wasps’ nest that burst on the northern line

            in the sad house of endless pain and woe

so home      simply because

      the women are reduced to begging for their survival

            underground      pennies wept from your eyes

it seems clear enough narrative stops

      scattergun prophylactic      false beard

            I will not go back      radiating outwards

orgasms in each fingertip      moving east

      where stops and starts      happened upon you

            just here      in this coffee shop under the needle

renaissance man      resurrection      Newgate

      Tower Hill      a singing head

            flowing under the river      listen again

we face each other through a black mirror

      it used to belong      your open secret

            heart wound      a split second      dances mattachins