On the reading
It's difficult to think about the many different ways of reading and reading a poem and then realise that just one of them goes into the world, repeatedly, here. The ways that I have read Horace recently include: Bertie Wooster-as-a-Fall-fan, Horace, world weary, angry & bitter, resigned-yet-compassionate, doing-the-standing-still, in a floral shirt, with a cravat, to Thomas Evans & Tom Raworth, holding my daughter Koto (for the first part), to complete silence, sweating, thinking of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, to uproarious laughter, and to myself. That they are rather grave in this recording is due to the fact that the humour needs an audience to arouse the reader, and that the references to several painful incidents ("like Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe" for example) are always painful. They, however, work best with some chilli in the jelly. I enjoy reading the Horace poems more than any others.
"Folklore" reads (in my head) at times with a Worcestershire accent. It is a mix of West Country burr & the Birmingham clip & whine but is only one of many parts that sound themselves though the sequence. Almost none of the voices are my own, although by the end they all are.
This recording was made on 9 September 2006, at a house in Stamford Hill, north London.
The following recording was made at the Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry festival, held 6-8 October 2006 in Cambridge, UK and organised by Emily Critchley with help from Catherine Brown.
Bibliography
- Folklore (Heart Hammer Press, Paris, 1996)
- To Repel Ghosts (Like Books, New York, 1998)
- Sonnets (The Figures, Great Barrington, 2000)
- Last Poems (Tolling Elves, London / New York 2003)
Anthologies:
- The Thunder Mutters (Faber, 2005)
- FOIL: An Anthology of New British Writing (Etruscan Press, 2000)
- Resolute (Platform Gallery Publications, 2000)
Sample text
ODES IV / 7
One minute I am sitting in Spud-U-Like
Intoxicated with abnegation
In the village of cats
But there I am one morning waking up to find myself in bed with both
Great compassion & the six classes of beings
The stiffness of winter
Followed by the amputation of a leg dust a shadow
And naked shingles of the world
As the great Plimp observed on more than one occasion
It is a dirty trick to scare a guy to death with banana oil
When he would rather be doing the navel gazing of a pampered recluse
"peen-bawl" featuring the grotesquerie of the
Grand Guignol
Mixed with some kind of insanely twisted Cartesian logic
One day Hippolytus
Ears crossing the calamities of 25,000 years of topsoil
When darkness falls upon a Rolling Stone
There will be no life outside Worcestershire
And that is no life at all
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