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Showing posts from April, 2005

Cambridge CCP

(If there is anyone out there, sorry it’s been so long – the festival has been hectic and draining. ) I managed to get to the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry at the weekend http://www.cccp-online.org/index.html . Great to see Simon Smith from the National Poetry Library, and of course Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk again and meet some new faces. The opening wasn’t auspicious though. Wendy Mulford, a Cambridge poet performed her work in progress the Unmaking - a poem about the highland clearances of the 1840s-1880s. As Kevin Nolan said in his introduction: 'what imagines itself as a periphery and what imagines itself as a centrality'. Even allowing for the absence the multi-media element (due to sickness) it was a terrible piece. The problem being flagged up in the introduction with the foregrounding of its narrative. Basically it is a simple 3 voice 'portentous' text mixing Gaelic and English source texts (without very much effort to experiment in the wea

Questions, questions.

I've been contacted by a new literary website opening up in June to answer a questionnaire about the Text Festival's critique of the mainstream: here it is - 1 The Guardian quotes you as saying that ‘poetry has nowhere to go other than being an anachronism or mild entertainment’. Which strands of poetry were you referring to specifically by using these terms? I actually said: From advertising to road signs, from logos to global branding to digital communications, text forms the visual and linguistic background to everyone’s existence. Once poets were seen as developers of language and ideas, the creators of new ways of thinking and expressing, but now poets are irrelevant except as radio comedians or advertisement copy-writers. Faced with a modern world where the written word or sign consumes and clutters virtually every environment, the fundamental question is how can poets and text artists work with language? Official Verse Culture pretty much ignores its