Free Poetry, Wordless Books, and Not a Literary Festival by Dan Holloway

A last minute edit to add a touch of controversy. This is from an interview with Adelle Stripe, who is headlining next week's Not the Oxford Literary Festival which I have been running for 4 years now. In 2006 she was the founder of Brutalism, often called the first literary movement spawned by the internet, and her latest collection, Dark Corners of the Land was 3am's 2012 Poetry Book of the Year (and the best poetry book published in the UK in many years IMO). What she says could apply just as much to contemporary prose as contremporary poetry and is an object lesson to all of us when we think that what we need is to produce better-edited, more professional works in order to make our mark.

“Most poetry I have come across in recent anthologies has a peculiar corpse-like quality to it. It’s as though you have walked into an art gallery, and under glass boxes, on whitewashed plinths, sit a collection of porcelain roses. They are elegant to observe, immaculately rendered, objects of refined beauty, but they don’t smell of roses.”
Full, brilliant interview, here.

This last month I have been chasing my tail frantically with two enormous and concurrent projects. First, I have been reading over 100 submissions for my forthcoming installation NOTHING TO SAY. Hugely time-consuming but very rewarding and highly instructive - so much so I wrote a long article HERE about what I learned about the state of contempoarary literature.

Second, I have been preparing for the 4th Not the Oxford Literary Festival, the independent, underground alternative to the very corporate event taking place here at the same time. We have been growing each year and this year have no fewer than 4 amazing events, all at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, OX2 6AA.

17 March – 5pm Ice Cold in Albion 

A year after the 100th anniversary of Scott’s ill-fated trip to the Antarctic, two brilliant and very different writers, Kiran Milllwood-Hargrave and Richard Pierce, take you back to the heart of winter

18 March – I am Blackbird 7.30pm

20 March Sadcore Dadwave 7pm

 

And rounding off the week, a rare as gold dust reading form the UK's greatest living poet Adelle Stripe, whose new collection Dark Corners of the Land was 3:am Magazine's 2012 Poetry Book of the Year.

22 March – Dark Lands and Cigarettes 7.30pm

All of which is to say I haven't really had time to stir up much in the way of awkwardness or trouble this month in the world of all things internet except for that first thing, where I accuse most modern writers of being utterly derivative and tear my hair out at the proliferation of very good, very polished books - of which there are TOO MANY.

Oh, the other thing I have been doing is almost finishing my new book, Guy and Evie, a heartbreaking story of obsession, lost ambitin, and redemption that has no words - it is told wholly in numbers. I won't say any more for now, but here is the opening paragraph:

1961

29/10 18:15 (457), 30/10 10:30 (577) 13:15 (126) 14:15 364, 3/11 23:45 129, 10/11 22:17 134, 25/11 09:38 148 

On a more conventional note, let me leave you with some poetry. First a free pdf of my collection "i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry" which accompanies my show "Some of These Things Are beautiful" at Cheltenham Poetry Festival on April 24th. There are tickets here. Click the image below to go to teh free download.

 

 And finally, a new poem I hope you will enjoy. See you all next month when I will be back to my old tricks I'm sure.

together alone (together) ()

276.314 kilometres from the postbox on your street
is a room
where i imagine you
watching marina abramovic
folding and unfolding opalescent bodies
into the envelope of a fireplace.

as the crow flies.
by road
my endless iterations of attempted quantification
are thwarted like beginner’s gambits
by carefully positioned lay-bys
where i climb banks and piss in coke bottles dusted with cigarette ash and pace in bushes in silent circles
waiting for doggers who never show.

it consoles me
that marina has fuelled 47082 more seconds
of our combined fantasies
than the someone
whose shit-smeared picture pulled cubist through
a salesman’s ass
catches tears warmed by that thought.

beside open bacon
in your kitchen are two bowls of
powder paint

red and blue and tomorrow
after we masturbate on the vinyl floor
we will mix them separately with the fluids
and in the afternoon
we will chip pieces of quartz from neighbours’
driveways and talk about
how one day we might paint them purple.