In case you're badly in need of an Ashbery review

here is Helen Vendler...

'Ashbery's remarks, in 1966, comparing the didactic intention of the "committed poets" of the time to the imaginative gaiety of Frank O'Hara are equally applicable to his own work. He says of O'Hara's poetry that it :

''has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Vietnam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignettes of the post-Atomic age: in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe.''

Try reading this one aloud

The reason I like Edna St Vincent Millay
Is that her name
sounds like a basketball
falling down stairs.

The reason I like Walt Whitman
Is that his name
sounds like Edna St Vincent Millay
falling down stairs.

(from little.red.boat.)

In unrelated news...He looks like

the morbid game of psychoanalyzing strangers in pictures (via Marthas Blog). One for the Bloggies.

Limerick Dictionary

An adjective serves as a label
Like "cancerous," "bright," or "unstable."
It modifies nouns
As in "frilly" nightgowns,
Often ending in "-est," "-er," or "-able."

Wales to get Poet Laureate

Exactly how exciting is this news? Whatever, Poemanias nominates Kathrine Grey...

I'm all for kicking a guy when he's down

but do you really need to spend a whole section of your latest collection doing it? Frank Kuppner must think so, judging by his parody of Eliot- subtly entitled 'West Aland' in his latest collection 'A Gods Breakfast'. Presumably the notion is that it's going to shove what remains of TS's reputation off the edge of the cliff it's been clinging to. Whatever. Somehow, it just doesn't feel like one of the Second Best Moments in Chinese History.

100% pure Bunting (+ link to 4 poems)

Bunting on Islam

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anaemia.

Bunting on Briggflatts

All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.

Bunting's advice to young poets

I SUGGEST:

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.

2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.

3. Use spoken words and syntax.

4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.

5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape
Put your poem away till you forget it, then:

6. Cut out every word you dare.

7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.

And Burnside goes for his top ten Scots List...

WS Graham stock rising fast. Sorley crawls in at tenth.

Looking for an online Anthology?

look at the bucketloads of Yeats in here.

Motion in movement...

Review of laureate's radio program:

'The poetic content is taxing but worth it. Less rewarding was Andrew Motion's connecting concept, all that talk of mapping, contours, terrains, inner landscape, flatlands, borders, edges, points of negotiation. He kept telling me where to go but didn't seem to know where he was going himself'

The Ham and High gets high on Stammers...

Now Stolen Love Behaviour is, no question, the real thing...

Szirtes on form...

Somewhere at the heart of language is an initial dislocation that is stitched up (I use the term advisedly) by an apparently arbitrary suture that makes for laughter and disquiet: the laughter of relief that things are not doomed to be dislocated; the laughter of surprise that the dislocation is healed in such remarkable fashion;

Armitage gets VE day commission

Channel Five has signed up poet Simon Armitage, whose TV credits include the award-winning "prison opera" Feltham Sings, to provide lyrics for a documentary commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in May.

Paul Farley Interviewed on BBCs the Verb

Specialist subject: Wordsworth's Daffodils. Paul spent a year at Dove Cottage, as poet in residence. Doesn't seem the kind of poem he would go for, but one can never tell. Coleridge didn't think much of it, and I can see his point.

Nick Laird's To a Fault

is a risky move for Faber, but at least its good to see them publishing someone young, especially after Dorothy Molloy dying and all. Here's one from the book - some how I can't decide whether the last image is really something or goes too far; maybe its both

Poetry

It's a bit like looking through the big window
on the top deck of the number 47.

I'm watching you, and her, and all of them,
but through my own reflection.

Or opening my eyes when everyone's praying.
The wave machine of my father's breathing,

my mother's limestone-fingered steeple,
my sister's tiny fidgets, and me, moon-eyed, unforgetting.

And then the oak doors flapping slowly open to let us out,
like some great injured bird trying to take flight.

Mipoesias inteviews Mark Strand

...My parents were worried, fearing that my dreaminess would make me vulnerable to those who would take advantage of me.

The Low Down on Jenny Diski...

Once I lived with a heroin addict in a kitchen. Every morning he went out for the day to score, kissing me on the cheek, and I pulled the candlewick bedspread – gold – over the mattress opposite the cooker. I washed his used syringe in the sink, squirting out the blood left in the barrel, getting it nice and clean. It seemed ordinary at the time. It was. Somewhere out there, I understood, suburban housewives were dusting and polishing, making the beds, clearing the breakfast table, and I thought they were really weird. How could anyone live like that, I wondered.

from Quotes of the Day

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

Clare Booth LuceUS diplomat, dramatist, journalist, & politician (1903 - 1987)

Clive James on the Flaubert Factor

What has our Clive got to say about the Bovarys?

The Reverend Percy Bysshe Shelley?

Some ones found the letters that got Bysshe expelled from Oxford: 'At the bottom of the trunk, which contained books of autographs of long dead showbusiness stars, Mr Jackson found letters by Charles Dickens, H G Wells and General Charles Gordon, before he spotted one signed "the Revenend Percy Bysshe Shelley".

The Telegraph on Hill

Here's the second review of Comus where Hill & co. want to establish that what we're looking at is a poet who 'so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank him in relation to them' or that he is the 'greatest living poet since hmmm'. Poemanias' take is: 'Geoffrey, get a life'.

If your not busy tonight...

The Literary Circle presents
CLIVE JAMES
& a selection of the brightest young poets in Britain

Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Olivia Cole, Christopher Simons,
Liane Strauss, Niccolo Milanese, Sarah Wardle...

Wednesday 23rd February
from 7.30 at the Poetry Café,
22 Betterton Street, Covent Garden.

Tragedy on the Russian Front...

The death of the poet Tatyana Bek has led to speculation that a falling-out with her fellow poets provoked her to commit suicide.

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/02/18/105.html

For those in need of a hit of Helen Vendler

get it here at the chronicle:

http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i21/21a01401.htm

and what about Jane Draycott?

looks like a seriously cool Carcanet cookie. She fessed up to a teenage infatuation with Hopkins - here ar a couple showing current (hot) form:


What matters

is the way we lived: you tying the laces
on each school day, gripping the shoulders
of your bike lest it move off alone and leave you
on your hunkers by the kitchen fire
performing surgery on the hoover
difficult and slack heavy as a teenager
your notebook copper-plated with the whole
Our Father, suppliers of discontinued kitchen parts
and impossibly distant addresses
then the last of the picnics, Travels with a Donkey,
the sweet yhears turning over and over
and you falling asleep as I read.




It begins with razors

It begins with razors or lighters,
its sharpness or fire akin to a ship
that is passing, a fragment or sample
of something much bigger and further away
such as fathomless caverns of silver,

whole acres of indigo, saffron or hemp
or hillside on hillside of spices or tea
laid out like a rug to lie down on or sleep.
But capping the bowl like the door
to a furnace some made it last longer,
run cooler for breathing in deeper
its skyfuls of clouds, so that burdens
grown lighter could rise in the water l
ike palaces turning to smoke,
for a pipe once alight is a dream
which is now or is never and ends
like a pipe of disposable bones
washed up on the foreshore
where in the same place the body
of a river ran just before.

Pinsky's off to Alexandria...

The Satrapy by Cavafy

Too bad that, cut out as you are
for grand and noble acts,
this unfair fate of yours
never helps you out, always prevents
your success...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33504-2005Feb17.html

Steven Burt Has A Blog...

And its right here

http://www.accommodatingly.com/

The Times reviews John Stammers Stolen Love Behaviour

as a love poet he is part of a tradition that dates back to the Elizabethan sonnet and beyond, that he writes the way he does. He does not de-activate powerful feelings by banishing them to historical cliché, but rather articulates them as they flourish in our contemporary culture...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1488855,00.html

THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP: ON ADDICTION: ARE YOU A POETRY ADDICT?

THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP: ON ADDICTION: ARE YOU A POETRY ADDICT?

And In Other News: Salman is not a happy bunny...

after Philip French takes a blunderbus at him

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050221/asp/frontpage/story_4405323.asp

Magma 31 Launch at the Troubadour February 28th

This issue has been guest edited by John Stammers and looks hot. Magma launch readings are packed with good readers. On the 8th the stars will include Sean O'Brien, Tim Turnbull, Oliva Cole.

Monday 28th February 8 to 10 pm, tickets £5.50 concessions £4.50, Troubaduor Coffee House265 Old Brompton Road LONDON SW5 for information, advance booking, season ticket & mailing list enquiries, phone 020-8354 0660, or write to Anne-Marie Fyfe at Coffee-House Poetry, PO Box 16210, LONDON, W4 1ZP or e-mail: CoffPoetry@aol.com

Just when you thought it had cooled down...

Don Paterson responds to Andy Croft's New Statesman charge of elitism...

http://www.newstatesman.com/Books/200501010048

Clive James interviews Alan Jenkins

Here’s Alan Jenkins in a video conversation with Clive James on the bizarre subject of poetry as a career. Alan's got a new volume coming out March 3rd from Chatto.

http://www.clivejames.com/library/section/?&LID=4&SID=5

Diary Date: Poetry London Launch coming up

Launch for the Spring Issue of Poetry London on Wednesday 16th March 2005. Readings by Matthew Sweeney, Paul Farley, Antony Dunn & Esther Morgan. 7pm at the Gallery at Foyles Bookshop, 2nd Floor, 113-119 Charing Cross Rd, London.Free entry (& wine).

Mark Quinn's selfportrait in frozen blood...

was not destroyed by workmen switching the fridge off in Nigela Lawsons kitchen after all. Turns out there are 3 versions of the piece, done every five years, with 9 pints of the artist's blood. They're worth about half a million quid each. One belongs to the Saatchis. Another is in California. The third piece was bought by some one in North Korea...North Korea, huh? 20 poemania points for the sleuth who figures out which NK collector sprung for it...

Brenden Kennally talks to Christina Patterson

Brendan Kennelly is more famous than Seamus Heaney. That's in Ireland, of course. In England, he can wander the streets without being noticed...

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=607381

Mcwilliam on Burnside

Candia weighs in on the Burnside effect.

http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=188592005