Episodes
Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry
November 28, 2010 11:23The view that prose poetry evolved through French poetry is a partial one. Such a perspective doubtless has its origins in the impact of that evolution on American, Polish and other traditions. Certainly there is a distinct line of development through Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), Charles Baudelaire’s immensely popular Petites Poémes en Prose (1869), and on through Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé to Gertrude Stein, the Surrealists, especially Francis Ponge and Max Jacob, all ...
So Here We Are 21
May 29, 2009 07:45Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPoradio SoHereWeAre The Long Beach poet and writer, Donna Hilbert, has been writing about death, grieving, class, alienation, motherhood, displacement and survival in a series of books since 1990. Brought up in the Red River Valley of Oklahoma near the Texas border, she has spent most of her life in southern California. What is distinctive about her work is not so much its seeming transparency and purity of language but rather its deployment and r...
Letter 20
March 11, 2009 13:49Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPoradio SoHereWeAre I would like to say a few words about Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection originally published as an e book and now published in hard copy by BlazeVox Books (www.blazevox.org) of New York. Juliet Cook’s Horrific Confection combines elements of magical realism and dark horror in a poetic exploration of the domestic, especially food, and the artificial. It is set deeply within the meaning of confection as a noun ‘the making or pr...
Letter 19 (new series)
February 07, 2009 11:41SHWA 19: A Note on Hugh Fox Hugh Fox, one of the co-founders of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors & Publishers (COSMEP) network, has been an abiding and colourful presence on the small press scene for forty years. COSMEP was founded at Berkeley in November 1968, by a generation born in the Thirties, to foster the post-Beat boom in small press publishing. Closely linked to Sixties counter-culture, the founders of COSMEP were interested in breaking down social, psychological, personal an...
Letter 18
October 31, 2008 08:45Click here for issuu link SoHereWeAre Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPoradio SoHereWeAre My first recollection of entering Piddles Wood near Fiddleford in the mid-Sixties is of sinking into wet mud along the rutted uphill path and of the constant patter of raindrops on a dense flora of shrubs, ferns, creepers and moss. Enchanted by this ancient woodland of oak, ash and hazel, I became a regular visitor and soon discovered the remains of a campfire strewn with cider and methyl...
Letter 17
October 04, 2008 15:20Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPOradio. SoHereWeAre Poetic fashions ebb and flow and there are always marginalised figures that pursue fields of interest that are on the edge of acceptability. The boundaries of poetic discourse are always blurred and being challenged by successive avant-gardes. The poetic field itself is infinitely expansive rather than limited to easily identifiable categories due to the nature of language and to the bohemian inclination towards difference and...
Letter 16
September 02, 2008 15:19Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPOradio. SoHereWeAre In my last talk I mentioned that Andrew Crozier shared some affinities with the poet, John Riley, an early contributor to The English Intelligencer. This is particularly noticeable in Crozier’s poem, ‘The Veil Poem’, where he employs a probing lyrical self to see beneath cognitive perception to unveil the shifts of light and dark. Moreover, Crozier repeatedly refers to light, mirrors, windows and glass in his poetry to indicat...
Letter 15
July 31, 2008 07:23Click here to listen to So here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre In my last talk I mentioned J.H. Prynne’s contribution to The English Intelligencer. I would now like to say a few words about literary connection in the context of Andrew Crozier, who collated and edited the first series of The English Intelligencer. Crozier, who died in April 2008, is a much less well-known figure than he might be and left a substantial and lasting legacy as a poet, editor and teacher. He was instrumental in...
Letter 14
June 29, 2008 19:03Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio SoHereWeAre In February 2004, Randall Stevenson writing in The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12 1960-2000: The Last of England? (OUP 2004) inadvertently sparked a media controversy by suggesting that the achievements of experimental poets, such as J.H. Prynne, would be of more lasting significance than that of the Movement poets. The value of J.H. Prynne’s poetry was debated in newspapers and on the radio but not seriously engaged w...
Letter 13
May 29, 2008 15:11Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Sele...
Letter 12
April 19, 2008 12:57Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio SoHereWeAre I thought that I might approach the idea of celebrity and issues around that cultural phenomenon in relation to English poetry. Initially I thought of Barry MacSweeney’s brush with celebrity in 1968 when his publisher, Hutchinson, nominated him for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry at the age of nineteen, following the success of his first book, The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells Of His Mother (1968), and of how he turned a...
Letter 11
March 14, 2008 14:35Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio SoHereWeAre I first encountered the poetry of Tom Raworth in Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain (Penguin 1969) anthology and Penguin Modern Poets 19 (1971) when I was at school. I was struck not only by the various art of the poetry but also by its comic touch. It immediately signalled a playful inventiveness that has been subsequently developed over more than forty years. Briefly, Raworth was b...
Letter 10
February 13, 2008 07:28Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre I want to say a few words about the second part of Basil Bunting’s poem Briggflatts (1966), which begins: Poet appointed dare not decline to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate the mission imposed, despised by toadies, confidence men, kept boys, shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores, touching acquaintance for food and tobacco. Secret, solitary, a spy, he gauges lines of a Flemish horse hauling beer, the angle, o...
Letter 9
January 01, 2008 15:28 - 22.7 MBClick here to listen to So Here We Are on miporadio. So Here We Are A great variety of absorbing poetry is obscured by its omission from mainstream publishing, newspaper reviews and the critical narrowness of national poetry awards. There is, at least, a lack of balance dating back to the late 1970s and the changes at the Poetry Society, as described by Peter Barry in Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). National poetry awards are essentially j...
Letter 8
December 02, 2007 20:10Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio So Here We Are Thomas A. Clark, born in Greenock, Scotland in 1944, writes an attentive poetry, giving space to each word and statement so that it can breathe and linger with the reader. His poetry is also attentive to walking, to the necessity of slow deliberation, and to words and their resonance. I would like to explore walking as a poetic theme using Clark’s work as a starting point to weave backwards and forwards. The first poem in T...
Letter 7
November 03, 2007 19:25Click below to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I would like to say a few words about the poet and translator, Bill Griffiths, who died in September, aged 59, and briefly sketch the context and scope of his work. He produced more than two hundred books and pamphlets and translated from Old English, Welsh, Romany, Latin, Norse and other languages. He was in the tradition of Radical pamphleteers, concerned with planting the Liberty Tree, and w...
Letter 6
October 07, 2007 08:02Download mp3 and link here. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England Travelling on the Damory Bus from my home to Salisbury is an event in itself. The bus company’s website and bus stop timetables offer no reliable information on the Service. We rely upon memory that there is a bus leaving the village some time between 9.20 am and 9.40 am and the hope that it continues. So here we are on the bus filled with retired professionals looking out at the summer landscape. There are plenty of ho...
Letter 5
September 03, 2007 14:28Click here to hear So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first saw the American poet and editor, Jerome Rothenberg read at the Portsmouth Polytechnic Fine Art Department in 1975. He began by meditating and chanting and took his audience on a wonderfully disparate journey through his New York and Polish Jewish background to his fieldwork with North American Indians and fascination with archaic and primitive poetr...
Letter 4
August 03, 2007 15:14Click on the link below to hear So here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England As this is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the poet, painter and engraver, William Blake, and August 12 is the anniversary of his death in 1827, I would like to say a few words about this remarkable figure. At mid-day on Sunday, 12 August 2007 the Blake Society will be unveiling a new memorial to Blake at Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where he...
letter 3
July 04, 2007 17:47Click on the link below to hear So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first walked along the Euston Road, London NW1, in September 1973, on the way to King’s Cross St Pancras, one hundred years after Arthur Rimbaud had lived in and around the area. Here he wrote most of those extraordinary prose poems, Illuminations that transform and allow the reader to see anew. They are filled with bridges, arches and railwa...
Letter 2
June 07, 2007 08:10Click below to listen to So Here We Are 2 on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first encountered the poetry of William Barnes when I was sixteen. I had been in Barnes House at Sturminster Newton school and had no real idea of what he wrote until I bought some books at the Dorset Bookshop in Blandford Forum. It was a charming, overflowing bookshop run by two elderly ladies who had published a book about Barnes. What was strik...
Letter 1
May 07, 2007 10:37Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England So Here We Are 1 You are listening to So Here We Are: poetic letters from England on Miporadio: where poetry tunes in. Hello. My name is David Caddy. I am an English poet and editor. In these poetic letters I shall be talking about English poetry. I should say that I love both English and American poetry and that I read both in equal measure and deli...