Recordings
This recording was made on 20 August 2005, at Drew Milne's flat in Highbury, north London.
Books of poetry: In a German Hotel. Cut Memories and False Commands. Switching and Main Exchange. Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures. Sound Surface. Alien Skies. Anxiety Before Entering a Room (selected poems). Surveillance and Compliance. Pauper Estate. The Imaginary in Geometry. Savage Survivals (forthcoming).
Co-editor of Angel Exhaust magazine, 1992-8 and 2004 onwards.
Translations. Co-editor and chief poetry translator for New Writing in German (special issue of Chicago Review, 2002). Pamphlets of translations of Thomas Kling, Lutz Seiler, and Erich Arendt. Frequent translations from German and Dutch for readings at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. Translations for the International Poetry Festival, Rotterdam, in 2004 and 2005.
Main languages French and German, I also have passing relationships with Russian, Swedish, Welsh, Latin, etc. Maybe I should mention doing a degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. This was part of my enthusiasm for David Jones, and was too short to afford in-depth knowledge, but did give me some acquaintance with languages like Old Irish, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse. Learning languages has been a permanent preoccupation over several decades, and feeds the part of my brain which I use for writing poems. I did an evening course in (Scottish) Gaelic in 2000-1 (paid for by my employer, for reasons I can't explain), and have been slowly absorbing more over the last 4 years I found Irish very hard to learn as an undergraduate, and it's still hard to learn, because the phonology is so unusual, but I am getting somewhere with the Scottish variant. I have just read a whole book in the language (Rioghachd nan Eilean). It was a TV spin-off (ulp). Learning all these languages doesn't mean I am an expert on modern poetry written in them - modern poetry is cryptic and tricky, as we know. In the case of Gaelic and Welsh, the mediaeval poetry is even trickier and more cryptic. I admit to reading modern poetry in German sometimes. Shopping for the books is an abiding problem. I am always impressed by Kevin Nolan's ability to go to a country and pick up what is happening, poetically speaking. I'm sure I always go to the wrong place and buy the wrong books.
This notion of moments when structure becomes visible is important. One wants a poem to be rare but also typical. Comparing cultures gives you that sort of Nolan moment, where a whole social structure swims to the surface; hard to put into human language, and to stage as a scene. Probably I have never written such a poem, but I am thinking about it. David Jones used to quote phrases of Welsh or Latin in a very disciplined way; a single burst of Gaelic speech, say 100 words, holds so much of the sound structure of the language, of the broad/narrow articulatory distinction and so on. Language is small enough for everyone to own it, but one language is amazingly different from another one. Social structure is what everyone has a copy of in their head, it is distributable - and so, perhaps, small enough to expose itself in a poem. I don't think my idea of sociology pours itself into objects in quite the way Jones' does.
Works on poetry. The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry. Secrets of Nature: Origins of the Underground (forthcoming).
My website is at www.pinko.org. Interview with Adam Fieled is here: www.artrecess.blogspot.com.
I had better make a statement about reviews of other poets. I have written about 160 of these. This is the basic outline of 40 years of British poetry. There is a list posted (at www.angelexhaust.com). This raises the question of the ones you can't get at I have two more books about poetry ready to go and am not tempted to release the material on the I-net before publication date. Everything takes about ten years to come out; conversely, I am not writing any more of these.
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