Nine Arches Press

New Under the Radar magazine Issue 9 - out now

2012-03-06T17:28:00.000Z

The latest issue of Under the Radar magazine is hot off the press and has hit the streets!

The latest issue includes poems by: Deborah Alma, B.W. Archer Graham Burchell, David Calcutt, Basil du Toit, Josh Ekroy, Cliff Forshaw Sheila Hamilton, Terry Jones, Milorad Krystanovich, Charles Lauder, Jr., Rupert Loydell, Richie McCaffery Afric McGlinchey, Ben Parker, Rennie Parker, Angela Readman, Rosie Reynolds, Aidan Semmens, Laura Seymour, Henry C. Smith, Jayne Stanton, Tony Vowles, Holly Walton and Chrissy Williams.

It also features two short stories by Siddhartha Banerjee and Daniel Barrow. Plus our usual selection of poetry pamphlet and book reviews by Charles Whalley, Michael W. Thomas, Matt Nunn, Maria Taylor and Matt Merritt.

To get your hands on the issue, just pop over to the Nine Arches Press shop. Subscriptions are currently £15.00 for four issues, and £4.00 for single copies. A steal, quite frankly....

More details about Under the Radar, including how to submit your poems and stories, can be found here on the magazine homepage. We pride ourselves on making it an ecletic and stimulating mix of new and more established poets. We only go to print when we think we've enough great poems and stories, and the magazine is very much at the heart of operations here at Nine Arches. It's also a gerat way of finding out more about some of the best contemporary poets writing at this time, and we hope each issue is a small snapshot of the current poetry climate. We try to keep cover costs low and teh conetnt quality as high as possible, as we're aware this is what readers are after, and there's been some great feedback about the latest issue already.

Interview with Tony Williams

2012-02-24T11:56:00.002Z

Tony Williams' first collection of poetry The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize. A book of short stories is forthcoming from Salt in 2012. He works as a lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. His pamphlet, All the Rooms of Uncle's Head was published by Nine Arches Press in 2011 and was awarded the Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice.

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head reviewed:

Steven Waling: BrandosHat

Sphinx Pamphlet Reviews

Stride Magazine

Nine Arches: All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head combines ideas about outsider art and questions about sanity and madness, as well as representing themes of freedom and incarceration both in the form and content of the poems. Could you please tell us a little more about the pretext and the concept behind the collection and what initially inspired these ‘broken tile’ poems?

Tony Williams: What inspired them was my discovery of outsider art, and in particular of the great body of art produced by inmates of mental asylums around the beginning of the twentieth century. As I understand it, there was a period when such people were beginning to be allowed to do art (the beginning of the art therapy movement, for one thing), and this coincided with the art world’s interest in primitivism, so there was this flowering when work as being produced and some of it was getting serious attention. Because of the nature of their illnesses – and, one suspects, their circumstances – the art they produced tended to have certain features. In general terms, they weren’t trained artists – insiders in that sense; and I think it’s also pertinent to say that many of them weren’t social insiders either. So the work they produced might not do what we normally expect art to do, or might do it in a surprising way. There’s a lot of bathos, of naffness, but in the best cases it’s delivered with such zeal and conviction that it transcends those judgements and enters another sphere, where the viewer seems to have crossed into a parallel universe with another artistic tradition. More specifically, there’s a lot of schematic work, use of text alongside images, idiosyncratic and convoluted visions, and a horror of white space – if the space is there, you have to fill it. There’s an amazing, strange beauty about some of the work, and a tremendous sadness too. You can find examples by googling ‘Outsider art’ or ‘Hans Prinzhorn’, who was the major figure in recognising and cataloguing the artwork of the mentally ill. In book form, Colin Rhodes’ Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives is a good place to start.

It was the sense of moving outside tradition into a strange alternative that fascinated me, I think. It isn’t that these artists were consciously experimental or original – there’s a lot of childishness and trying to be traditional, it’s just that they don’t get it quite right. And yet the results do appear to speak of human experience, as if tradition has been rewired so that bathos does the job of pathos. I started to wonder what an equivalent poetry might be, that looked longingly at tradition but didn’t understand it, and had a go anyway. In many ways I’ve always been a traditional poet not necessarily in the sense of being stylistically conservative, but in being conscious of literary traditions and learning from them in a rather deliberate way. So it seemed a useful exercise to try to write in ways which cut against that tendency.

That was the motivation; I’m not quite sure how the tiles evolved from that. But I knew that the main text would not be enough, that the voice I was imagining wouldn’t be able to resist adding commentary to amplify and add to the poems themselves (filling the page, again), so that’s where the marginalia came from. I think from there I started to wonder what the texts would be written on – pages in a book seemed too dull – and somehow I came to these ceramic tiles. Maybe he tiles his room with them, or chucks them at jackdaws. Eventually that led me to the cover story where these fragments of tile have been found in a basement, and I’ve come along and put some of them back together. That’s suggestive in various useful ways.

The poems capture the voice of their narrator both powerfully and respectfully. To write both about mental illness, and in the voice of someone who is mentally ill, raises issues of authority and the necessity to avoid parody or exploitation. There is also an interesting power in giving a voice to the powerless, which I imagine has to be carefully balanced. How did you successfully navigate these concerns?

Yes, I was nervous about this whenever I thought about publishing the texts – but not in the writing. I think I was fairly clear in my own head that I was doing this absolutely respectfully, not as a pastiche or a parody but really to learn from these artists as artists (‘What do they do? What can I do that’s analogous?). Of course I’m not an inmate, and I’m not an outsider – I do on the whole know what I’m doing when I write a poem. But looking at these pieces which mentally ill people had produced seemed to loosen something in my head, giving me glimpses of an imagery which connected with an obscure area of memory and experience, and I wanted to know if I could develop a writing technique which enabled me to reach that experience for myself. In the event, of course, the answer is mainly No – but I was able to move towards it, getting more glimpses. What began as a kind of ventriloquism, taking on somebody’s else’s voice – which I think is ultimately the dangerous thing you refer to – actually did develop into a way of approaching my own experience, albeit in a fictionalised and highly changed way.

When the pamphlet was coming up for publication, I did get nervous, and anticipated that, if it did get reviews, there would be some who disapproved of the project on grounds of exploitation. So far, though, I’ve been lucky; people haven’t challenged it on an ethical basis, so hopefully that means I did it in a suitably respectful way. The way I look at it is that I’m trying to learn from some wonderful artworks, which seems to me a defensible relationship to strike with the artists that produced them

Why did you decide on the use of the sonnet or ‘broken’ sonnet form for these poems?

That was easy – so much of the art that inspired me is highly formalised or schematic, with calendars, diagrams, labels, etc. It’s very symmetrical and often clearly intended to illustrate a world-view or allegorise or ‘mean’ something, however disastrously it fails to achieve this intention. So I felt that an overtly formal poetry would be the literary equivalent. These texts are supposedly being written at the high modernist moment, but of course they completely ignore it. What could be more attractive to someone attempting to communicate a fixed, elaborate world-view than the sonnet?

Do you regard All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head as a poem-sequence or not?

Well, in an obvious way the answer is yes. Certainly each tile has a poem at the heart of it, however you define the marginalia and the graphical presentation as something inside or outside that. And in pamphlet form – well, Nine Arches is a poetry publisher, and I write poetry, so it must be that, right?

On the other hand, it’s lovely to think of the tiles not quite fitting generic definitions. I was continually hoping to not quite write poems, so it’s apt if the result is not quite a poem sequence. And I do have this pipe dream of producing an edition which is actually printed on ceramic tiles, which are then smashed. You could put them back together and frame them, or just put all the pieces in a tea chest and let people rummage through. Art-house literary Lego. In that form of course it would be more like fine art, and the read–viewer’s experience would be very different. If anyone’s got a couple of grand to spare to pay for printing the tiles, do get in touch!

And, taking that back to the idea of the sequence, although we did think a lot about the best order to print the tiles (and I’m grateful to Nine Arches for your help with this – actually the order is mainly yours, not mine), actually the fiction says that the fragments were discovered mixed up – so any order we present them in is imposed afterwards, not by the original creator. Maybe it makes more sense to think of it as a series, rather than a sequence.

The poems themselves in All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head are beautifully designed and intricately laid out; they have an innate physicality and presence about them. You are a graphic designer as well as a poet – so is it something you’ve wanted to combine and experiment with for a while? And do you think is there enough attention to the visual aspects and layout of poems in contemporary poetry?

Thank you. I do, or did, some graphic design work over the years, although I was never formally trained. My dad was a graphic designer, so he showed me stuff and then I learned on the job. And when we were bored as children my mum would say, ‘Read a book. Write a book. Paint a picture.’ So yes, the impulse to do something was always there. Apart from anything else, it’s nice to make nice things, and hold them in your hands. Doing the tiles was a completely playful thing, going back to those childhood activities. I was supposed to be doing a PhD, so what could be more fun than to mess about with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign on these preposterous tiles? (I put them into the PhD submission, but neither of the examiners liked them.) Obviously when it came to the publishing it was important what the end result looked like – I’m very happy with it turned out, and very grateful to Nine Arches for the work you put in to making it look and feel right.

As for attention to the visual in contemporary poetry – sometimes. There are some wonderful productions from people like Nine Arches and Salt, my other publisher (I’m very lucky in that regard), Donut, and so on. I do like the austere Faber tradition, although I may be in a minority. It is personal. I remember loving Etruscan’s production of Tom Leonard’s Intimate Voices, but loathing the look and feel of his Voices in the Silence. Some poetry publishers, who I had better not name, have house style which I find appalling – and not just among the smaller presses. But you know – I may have been a professional designer, but I was never an expert, so no one should listen to me.

As we’ve mentioned, the poems are presented upon the page. They also present the reader with a combination of challenges and choices in terms of how they approach and read them – with text running around the sides and alongside the poems, cracks across the text and so on. Did you have to balance the aesthetics and readability carefully? And how do you choose to read them?

Yes, I don’t quite know how the poems would be read. Do you start with the main text and then look at the rest for afters, or do it the other way round? Mix together the marginalia and the rest of it? I don’t know – not my problem, and actually I hope part of the fun, making the reader think about what they’re doing. In that respect at least it’s more like a piece of art, in that it’s just there and you can choose to look at it how you like. It escapes the tyranny of the page. Of course I do have to tackle the same problem when I read from the tiles – do I read out all the marginalia, or just the main poem, or what? I haven’t quite solved that one yet; I tend to read the main text, but it feels as if more could be done in performance to help the tiles reach their potential. I think though that it’s in performance that the project could start to become disrespectful – if I play a mentally ill person, that feels much more problematic.

With the cracks, I was rather conservative – there are very few places where much of the main text is invisible, so you have to work sometimes but there are no tiles where you just have half the poem and you have to imagine the rest of it. Steven Waling took me to task for that in his review, saying that more gaps would have been good, and I think perhaps he’s right. The premise is that the tiles only exist as fragments, so maybe some of them should be less complete. At the same time, the idea is that this is a selection of the tiles, so by implication there are gaps in between the tiles – whole tiles missing.

Read an extract and find out more about All the Rooms of Uncle's Head

Buy a copy of All the Rooms of Uncle's Head

Featured Poem: Milorad Krystanovich - The Palm Tree Shedding Stars

2012-02-14T11:56:00.000Z

Milorad Krystanovich was born in 1950 in Dalmatia, then part of the former Yugoslavia. He studied literature at Split University before becoming a teacher. After conflict engulfed the region, Milorad was sent to safety with relations in the UK in 1992. He learnt English and later joined The Cannon Poets, becoming a founder member of Writers Without Borders and an active and well-respected figure within Birmingham’s poetry and writing community.

Hailed by Jonathan Morley in 2007 as “Birmingham’s finest émigré poet”, Milorad’s published work includes three volumes published by Writers Without Borders. Heaventree Press published the bilingual Four Horizons / Četiri Vidika (2005) and, in English, The Yasen Tree (2007). His penultimate volume, Improvising Memory, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. His final collection, Moses' Footprints, will be published in March 2012.

Jim Crace wrote that “Milorad Krystanovich demonstrates superbly what can happen when a good ear, a good eye, and a good heart are applied to the challenges and opportunities of poetry”.

Milorad also taught Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian at the Brasshouse Language Centre in Birmingham and wrote numerous plays and novels for children and young people. Milorad Krystanovich was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2009 and died in September 2011.

THE PALM TREE SHEDDING STARS

I.

Waiting for the shape of a spirit
to come, my brother,
I look through your eyes
by which you entered the enigma
of death:

the tree bathes under the shade
of many others still growing
and spreading their green, more mysterious
than the secret of greenness.

Imploring sunlight to come closer
to my view from the river bank,
I stare at the reflection
of what once was your figure –
the world of undeleted agony:

as present as water
streaming slowly through its discovery
of the midday, my presence cleaves
your never-unifying hum,
the end that could not be nearer than it was.

II.

The seagull carries the layer
of snow on its wings
equally to me and to the tree:

I see the feathers in the air,
not the bird flying,
as fatal as last sleep
amongst the ruins of my father’s memory.

I land a frail boat,
far distant and far close to the port;
how the past pours itself
from daylight into dusk.

With white in their gravity,
snowflakes miss his ripped-off roof,
one by one, they cross his window
to reach the others on the pane.

The beginning of the clouds’ flow bends
over his home, his looks ascend
into the mountain of the heavy sky
he lives beneath and whose name he forgets.

Wrecked between the evening and the night,
the palm branches are not distant any more. If I say
they are like a hammock full of stars,
he hardly recognises
that my voice is that of his son.

III.

Sand and the shallows persist
not along the beach
but within my footsteps
while my sandals draw water off
from the sleepy silence of the surface:

in order to recall the words
she has forgotten,
mother stares at the empty page
of my notebook.

While her shadow is stretched
beneath the shade of the palm tree,
she looks not beyond
but from beyond to see me leaving:

in order to approve itself,
sunshine flows easily through daylight;
where are you going?
her voice is tuned like a flute’s wonder.

Not knowing where the sun
commands me or what for,
I’m silent –
a handful of soil in my mouth:

She waits to hear me
through the sound of the language
she taught her son,
but my way of no return is
more never-ending than Dalmatia itself;

although she isn’t blind
her eyes are like shutters tightly closed,
the string of her sight is broken
and the watery beads roll down her wrinkled face.

IV.

The streetlights begin their descent
in front of the house
empty of my family:

no-one looking out the window
can entirely save the bareness
of the garden grass outdoors.

Nobody has survived;
the war ripples lengthening
the spell flooding the streets.

Cast by the lantern light,
my shadow glides across the terrace
and darkens the stone’s enigmatic plain:

to collect the stars
I shake the sky, the clear night sky
over the palm tree,

but my eyes are not open
to see the stars falling
to be gathered.

I wait for that which was long ago
and once again it can be
my destination – the tree
safer with my silhouette:

I listen to a blackbird on a branch
as regretful as a self-portrait in the mirror,
the black feathers never still enough
to be properly pictured by my eyes.

I cannot paint the air
better than the sky drawing a rainbow
for itself;
no raindrops, no sunlight,
just my daydreaming of water

and, under the tree branches with the wet leaves,
I turn my outlines into night
and my tears become the star-bringers.

From Moses' Footprints by Milorad Krystanovich

About Milorad Krystanovich’s Moses' Footprints:

In the shadows of war, loss and longing, a poet seeking his homeland finds his memories and dreams of its distinctive beauty refracted through a second language. These subtle, elusive and potent poems build bridges of imagery and language between the past and present, the lost and found.

"Here is a rich legacy bypassing Milorad's difficult final years. The poems seem driven, necessary; Croatia and its language call him back, his distinctively developed English finds image after pertinent image. The book is a bounty of metaphor as he is led by Moses and by delight and necessity of observation and discovery; the natural world seems to come to him to be named. I wonder if the frequent 'you' is himself or an other - or heightened to an Other - or these variously. I understand from this book that if we do not see, hear, experience in our own truthful way and make poems with the openness of these poems, then in some crucial sense many of the human world's possibilities cease to exist."
- David Hart.

"I can't stop reading these poems. This is work of atmosphere and tone first, narrative second, but it's a narrative that combines deep melancholy with a hard-won sense of joy in the slightest shaft of light, and the thought it provokes. At times it's like trying to recall a receding dream or encountering an oracle with an urgent, impossible message for you alone. It's difficult for me to separate the poems from Milorad's generosity, gentleness and intense imagination, and in a sense that doesn't matter as these are so clearly poems by a man who found beauty, saw mystery and took dignity even in confinement."
- Luke Kennard.

Moses' Footprints is launched as part of the event 'Milorad Krystanovich: A Celebration' on 2nd March 2012 at the Moseley Exchange, Birmingham.
Full launch details here.

A Celebration: Milorad Krystanovich

2012-02-02T14:13:00.000Z

You are invited to join us at:

More details about Moses' Footprints here.

Featured poems by Milorad Krystanovich will be posted up on this blog a little later on this month.

Featured Poems by Phil Brown

2012-01-15T16:55:00.000Z

Phil Brown teaches English in Sutton and has been regularly writing poetry for about ten years. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize and won the Eric Gregory Award in 2010. He has had his work published in Magma, Pomegranate, Dove Release: New Flights and Voices (Worple Press, ed. David Morley), Dr. Rhian Williams' The Poetry Toolkit (2009, Continuum), and the forthcoming Salt Collection of Young British Poets (ed. Roddy Lumsden), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (ed. Kim Lockwood and Todd Swift) and Coin Opera 2 (ed. Jon Stone). He is the Poetry Editor for the online magazine and chapbook publisher, Silkworms Ink. His debut collection, Il Avilit, has just been published by Nine Arches Press.

POETRY LIBRARY

Unabashed scream of pre-teen paddlers in a fountain
wafts through the skylight
undermining the room’s synthetic autumn.

A bronze bust of Dylan Thomas peers past me
to the pretty lady skim-reading Rilke
by the sliding shelves.

I am dwarfed by the nepotistic quarterlies lining the walls,
a paper network of favours
I will never be able to anything offer.

I replace the list of publishers in its plastic pocket,
bin my books
and go to splash my feet in the fountain.

THE SINCEREST HUG

Four months in I was a mess:
I had the whiskey-ripened pimples
the lost journeys home
and a belly to rival my father’s.

It was the shaking that really upset me though.
On a night when the rain meant business
I sheltered under the cinema’s canopy
and rolled my second cigarette.

A man, I make no judgements but he stank,
asked for a roll-up. Usually I wouldn’t,
but this guy looked terrible. When I’d rolled
it for him and lit his tip, he insisted

on the sincerest hug I ever received.
After a few seconds of embracing,
the stranger pulled back
looked at me concerned.

You drink too much boy
you shaking like the devil got you.

STAGE FRIGHT

Do not buy a beautiful notebook
with the hope of coaxing beautiful thoughts
onto the page as if all they needed
was a well-lit stage on which to flourish.

Buy the book by all means but be warned
that your thoughts will shrivel and cower
until there is no beautifully-bound
cahier and no mellifluous fountain pen.

Accept that the only real poetry
has its first airing on the backs
of bus tickets, or the margins
of newspapers, or if you have a real

opus on your hands, then that is
where you must write it;
on your hands. You will never
have a great meal in the most

expensive restaurant, and the plushest
hotel rooms will always be
conducive to bad sex. So throw
away your moleskeins and let the poems

loose, let them infect the fodder
of your wallets and pockets
and napkins and tickets, plant them
where it is dark enough to grow.

All poems from Il Avilit by Phil Brown (Nine Arches Press 2011)

Further details or purchase a copy here.
Read an extract of this book here.

About this publication: Phil Brown’s Il Avilit moves forcefully between the noise and disorder of the modern world, picking through the debris of the many lives we lead, leaving a trail of perfectly poised and fiercely observed poems. Dejected teachers, low-life pub landlords, faithless lovers, libertines and heroes populate this piercing and quick-witted debut, where darkness and regret linger at the corner of the pages. Whilst the poems go toe-to-toe with the big subjects of lust, loss and deception, the collection remains savvy, upfront and entertaining. Brown’s poems seek to confide in their reader with precise and carefully-measured words in their ear, finding their form and shape in persistent and surprising ways.

Launched: 1st December 2011. Price: £9.00 ISBN: 978-0-9570984-0-4

Praise for Phil Brown's Il Avilit:

“Ink spilled from a dark wingtip overhead… with pitiless skill this shade of Baudelaire unmakes his life and lays it out for our delectation – a casual gift, a rarefied vision, a human sacrifice.” – Hugo Williams

“Phil Brown’s poems jump across the page, play with language and meaning, and interrogate – thumb in collar – our multifarious, simultaneous worlds. From Sir Gawain on the Northern Line to the sleazebag publican – from Chiron in Southend to an American president on his deathbed – these poems blend urban, virtual, and mythical experience through a sharply observant eye, fizzing like intellectual fireworks as they go.” – Katy Evans-Bush

Part of the Debut New Poets Series.

Find out more about Debut here >

Back for 2012: Leicester Shindig open-mic on 23rd January

2012-01-10T19:21:00.000Z

Season's Greetings from Nine Arches Press

2011-12-22T16:45:00.000Z

A very Merry Christmas to all our loyal book-buyers, readers, poets and writers, good friends and cherished supporters. Here's to health and happiness and a excellent year ahead in 2012.

Here are a selection of Christmas and New Year poems from Nine Arches Press publications for you all to enjoy from Peter Carpenter, David Morley and Matt Nunn.

Have a good one, and enjoy all the very best that the season has to offer!

Peter Carpenter

Santa

Not some red-gowned fraud in Hamleys, all fake

white beard and seedy laugh. No, a thin saint,

Spanish, stress on the first ‘a’ – Galicia his place

of birth – there, with his small ring-shaped cake,

in the market square, by a stone fountain,

not wishing to give offence, hair silver-grey,

close-cropped, he nibbles and picks, incognito

in the gabble of stalls, miles away, replaying

an ascent of steps cut back into a cliff-face,

the swell and suck of tide, a trawler’s rainbow

spillage, gulls tatty in its wake. On the actual day

he’ll eat fish, lift white flesh from feather-trace

of bone, wet slate of skin. Then he’ll break

the bread, listen for ages, wait for his god in silence.

from: After the Goldrush. Further details about this title here.

Peter Carpenter is co-director of Worple Press and was recently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading. His fourth collection of poetry is Catch from Shoestring; and he recently published a fifth collection, After the Goldrush with Nine Arches Press. Peter also contributed to Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances (Penguin).

David Morley

Abandoned Christmas Tree Plantation

We are waiting for a Christmas that never came,

each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue.

All the years, heights and postures are present

like children in a school that no child ever leaves.

Each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue:

those adolescent spruces prickle with boredom

like children in a school that no child ever leaves.

The infant firs sing to themselves in the snow.

The prefect pines, sky-high, peer down unmoved.

Those adolescent spruces prickle with boredom;

the infant firs sing to themselves in the snow.

We speak through the wind and only then in murmurs;

stretch our limbs into the wind to catch at birds.

The prefect pines, sky-high, peer down unmoved

bartering a bullfinch song for a goldfinch chime.

We speak through the wind and only then in murmurs.

By dusk we are whispers and secret playtime rhymes.

We stretch our limbs into the wind and catch at birds.

Our tree rings are school bells that peal in December

bartering a bullfinch song for a goldfinch chime.

By dusk we are whispers and secret playtime rhymes.

All the years, heights and postures are present.

Our tree rings are school bells that peal for December.

We are waiting for a Christmas that will never come.

from The Night of the Day. Further details here.

David Morley is a British poet, critic, anthologist, editor and scientist of partly Romani extraction. He has published eighteen books, including nine collections of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages including Arabic. His latest collection from Carcanet is called Enchantment and is out now.

Matt Nunn
Long Mynd, New Year’s Day

No, there ain’t no god to fix us,

so we drift, chewed up and flobbed out

from between the jaw-line of battering weather

and flaming expletives swirling abusively

down from the angry Black Mountains,

pausing only to pull moonies into the void

and for you to sprinkle erratically,

until we trip over ourselves, kiss

the high sky of sheep and fall

onto our muck-splattered throne

to feel our bonces, gone rotten with booze,

blast off over the valley

and watch cloud moods clear smoothly, daubing

oozes of sun onto people awakening

to the fabulous shades of hope gathering.

This could be a fucking brilliant year.

from Sounds in the Grass. Further details about this title here.

Matt Nunn was born in West Bromwich in 1971 and works as a freelance poetry workshop leader and freelance writer. His work has taken him into many obscure places. Amongst other things he is the the co-editor of Under the Radar and Nine Arches Press. He lives with his wife, son and daughter in some kind of bliss in Solihull.

More Nine Arches Press publications and poem samples here.

Announcing Phil Brown's Il Avilit and the arrival of the Debut New Poets Series

2011-11-23T15:43:00.000Z

Phil Brown's Il Avilit

Part of the Debut New Poets Series – Launched 1st December 2011

Read an extract from this collection here >

Phil Brown’s Il Avilit moves forcefully between the noise and disorder of the modern world, picking through the debris of the many lives we lead, leaving a trail of perfectly poised and fiercely observed poems. Dejected teachers, low-life pub landlords, faithless lovers, libertines and heroes populate this piercing and quick-witted debut, where darkness and regret linger at the corner of the pages, reminding us that an urgent clock ticks with our every step.

Whilst the poems go toe-to-toe with the big subjects of lust, loss and deception, the collection remains savvy, upfront and entertaining. Brown’s poems seek to confide in their reader with precise and carefully-measured words in their ear, finding their form and shape in persistent and surprising ways.

Interview with Angela France

2011-11-22T09:39:00.000Z

Angela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and abroad, and has been anthologised a number of times. She has an MA in ‘Creative and Critical Writing’ from the University of Gloucestershire and is studying for a PhD. Her second collection, Occupation, is available from Ragged Raven Press. Angela is features editor of Iota and an editor of ezine The Shit Creek Review. She also runs a monthly poetry café in Cheltenham, Buzzwords. Lessons in Mallemaroking, her latest publication, is a Nine Arches Press pamphlet.

Image credit: Hanka Jaskowska

There's a story behind the wonderful title of your pamphlet, 'Lessons in Mallemaroking' - would you like to explain its origin?

I first heard the word ‘mallemaroking’ on a radio programme where revisions to the OED were being discussed and immediately fell for the word because of its wonderfully precise definition: the drunken carousing of sailors on ice-bound whaling ships in Greenland. It’s not unusual for me to become enthralled with an unusual word, or phrase, and such fascinations usually find expression in poetry. I wrote a few poems from ‘mallemaroking’, exploring its possibilities and potential – there is one in the pamphlet and another in my earlier collection Occupation.

Something else which is striking about the pamphlet is a palpable feeling of unease in some of the poems, a sense of foreboding, things going quietly wrong with the world which often animals, rather than people, have already sensed. It's a subtle yet insistent theme of warning. Were you conscious of developing this theme within the poems, and did you intend to write about ecological concerns?

While I am concerned about ecological issues, as I think anyone with any awareness of the world must be in these days, I wasn’t consciously setting out to develop the theme. With individual poems it was quite often the case that a number of things came together to trigger the poem. For instance, after the extreme floods here in Gloucestershire in 2007, I had been reading about the potential for flooding in London if the sea level rose just a little, I had already been deeply affected by the horror of the Indonesian tsunami in 2004 and I had heard stories of animals seeking high ground in advance of it. I was also thinking that if London were threatened by flood, the wealthy could easily leave for new homes on high ground. All of these things came together eventually in the poem ‘Bad Tidings’ where those who couldn’t leave were left to ‘watch the river, the barrier, /the water rising.’

I didn’t realise how many of the poems had that sense of warning, of foreboding, until I was putting the pamphlet together; I suppose it is a natural consequence of my concerns about what we are doing to this planet.

Absences and vanishing acts also are a frequent theme. And you use a John Burnside quote, 'No one invents an absence' to open the pamphlet. What intrigues you about absence? And is poetry itself a way of trying to understand what is missing and fill in the gaps - perhaps both in the physical world and in the case of language itself?

I had written a few poems about absence of one sort of another (although I hadn’t noticed it as a recurring theme until someone else pointed it out to me) before I came across the Burnside quote but finding the quote really focussed my attention on the concept of absence. My initial reaction on reading 'No one invents an absence' was to think that it was wrong – as a writer, I can invent anything I want to. It is one of those phrases, though, that became more and more slippery the longer I thought about it and it became clear that you can’t invent an absence – but can only invent something that is taken away to create an absence. Absence intrigues me because every absence is unique; its shape and quality defined by what is missing – so that by exploring absence one can find a ghost of what was once there.

Yes, poetry itself is, I think, a way of trying to understand what is missing. I use poetry – the writing and reading of it – to examine the human condition. Poetry so often attempts to express something for which we don’t have precise words; as much happens in the spaces between the words, and the way words work together, as in the language of the poem itself. A favourite quote from Dylan Thomas is “You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.” – and there they are again, the gaps and absences.

There are some well-known narratives or characters behind some of your poems in the pamphlet. You often reinvent stories by retelling them from different viewpoints or following up on the after-story; what influenced this approach and do you think poetry has a particular role to play in going back in exploring these familiar narratives and giving voice to characters?

We all rely on stories, all the time – Salman Rushdie said “we are the storytelling animal, there is no other creature on earth that tells itself stories in order to understand who it is”. We use stories to explain ourselves to others, to understand the world around us, to understand and process strong emotion. As children, the traditional stories are important to us as guides and warnings and as ways to experience right and wrong, good and bad, safely. As I’ve said, I use poetry to explore the human condition so using poetry to re-vision stories is an extension of that impulse. I believe stories are very powerful and re-visioning them in poetry is a way to test their (and their characters’) boundaries to see what more they may have to say.

Finally, one of these poems, 'Hide and Seek Champ Found Dead in Cupboard' has an interesting origin, and has also been published in a publication not normally known for its poetry features! Tell us more...

The poem came about because I found a list of old Sunday Sport headlines online. While they seem very, very, silly at first reading they often hold deeper truths in irony when one thinks about them, as it was with 'Hide and Seek Champ’. As a poem, it did well - being shortlisted in the Arvon competition and, of course, being in ‘Lessons in Mallemaroking’. However, it led to something I didn’t expect at all when I got a phone call from a Sunday Sport journalist; he had found the poem online and recognised the title as one of their headlines. He wanted to print the poem and a story about me in the paper. I have to confess that I was very anxious about it and had no idea what they would do with it; the front page headline for that week was ‘Gordon Ramsay Sex Dwarf Eaten by Badger’!

When it was printed, they did a straightforward article and published the poem in full, properly credited so I had nothing to worry about. It is a guaranteed way to prevent me taking myself too seriously though – I suspect it may be the first time a serious poem has shared a page with such headlines as ‘Adolf Hitler was a Woman’ and ‘Lez Lover Attacked with Dildo’. It’s also probably the largest readership I’ll ever have for a poem, even if I was the only fully-clothed woman in the whole publication!

Lessons in Mallemaroking:

Price £5.00. Published July 2011.

Read an extract from Lessons in Mallemaroking, or buy a copy here >

Praise for Angela France's Lessons in Mallemaroking:
"Angela France conjures a world of absences and menace with precise and elegant language. Things have begun to fall apart; the creatures are already wise to it. Dogs whimper at night and the horses are watchful of changing weather, they creak light from their joints/as they stamp, swish tails. Buddleia is sprouting through the concrete of driveways and petrol stations. We watch the river, the barrier,/the water rising. These excellent poems come as a warning."

– Martin Figura

"Here are poems that inhabit fully the physical world and explore the ever-shifting boundary between the physical and the metaphysical. Angela France has the craft to sustain her compelling and varied subject matter, and she uses language with controlled intensity, lyric energy, and an unerring sense of how to balance a poem. She is a poet not content with anecdote, but one who engages with the tough uneasy realities of experience." – Penelope Shuttle

Featured Poem: Deborah Tyler-Bennett - 'Floyd on Exiting'

2011-10-25T09:47:00.000+01:00

FLOYD ON EXITING

I.M.: Keith Floyd, 1943–2009 / William Gibson, 1884–1955

When Keith Floyd died,
tabloid story: CHEF’S FINAL FEAST
(partridge, cocktails, full-blown wine)
reminded Mum of Billy Gibson’s partied going
(bitter, dessert cake, marinated song)
at Sutton Lib Club’s Pensioners’ Christmas Night.
Billy poling up come dawn’s glazed light, trilby tight-
balanced at crown’s back, wrong
scarf … Piquantly ‘worse for wear’,
boasting booze too much, food too much,
‘fantastic times’ tasted. Such
swanning served later by friends, their
glacé eyes. He’d sung: Let him go, let him tarry,
let him sink, let him swim’.
‘Suffer tomorrow’, Daughter grinned
at forced defiance. ‘Your head’ll be
that old chestnut: THE DRUNKARD’S CURSE’.

Mates re-heated Billy’s refused
seat downstairs, he’d felt abused,
well-meaning Steward, ill-versed
in tact, asked: ‘Able-bodied?’ Boozing
upstairs, dying-up to ‘Showman’ nick-name,
ballad’s flambéd flame.
Gone in bed, no bruising
hang-over, cure un-needed.
Now, Floyd’s obituary note,
mean-spirited rival gloats
of days mis-lived. Still, something to be said
for tables left post- savoured food and drink,
hung-over insecurities dwindled (think
reducing stock). Obits gut and joint the dead,
no cognac after-glow …

Fabled feasts feed hungry ghosts, allow
my unrepentant Angel’s chorus: ‘Let him tarry, let him go.’

From Mytton... Dyer... Sweet Billy Gibson... by Deborah Tyler Bennett.

A Nine Arches Presss pamphlet. Buy a copy here.

Autumn Events & Workshop Round-Up

2011-10-20T16:33:00.001+01:00

Apologies for an absence from the blog over recent weeks. We've been incredibly busy between various events for both Warwick Words and Birmingham Book Festival. So here's a quick report on what we've been up to.

National Poetry Day on October 6th was split between Warwick and Nottingham. In the morning, we ran a 'How to Get Published' workshop for Warwick Words Festival at the Friend's Meeting House. The above photo was from that workshop - two workshoppers exploring poetry magazines in their 'editorial teams' and reporting back with their findings. This was a lively sell-out session, and there's so much to say and discuss about poetry-publication that we were kept busy for the whole three hours.

We covered everything from getting your first poems out there to finding out about poetry magazines and learning about the difference between types of poetry publishers. In between this we debated self-publishing, vanity publishing, how best to submit your work and how to go about promoting what you do. We also included advice about making sure your poetry avoids the pitfalls that often beset new poets (a quick crash-course in identifying cliche and how to keep your work fresh) and how to make sure you keep developing and honing your poetry skills. Quite a packed session as you can imagine, and we had some great feedback from those who came along.

Following this, I headed to Nottingham to meet with Robin Vaughan-Williams at Nottingham Writer's Studio and fellow publisher Alex McMillen of Templar Poetry for another National Poetry Day event. We had further lively debate about poetry publishing here, and I discussed Matt Merritt's Nine Arches Press collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (we'd been asked to talk about collections with interesting structures and shapes, and this one struck me immediately as the most relevant, with its three definite sections and selections of 'glass harmonica' poems).

On Friday 7th October, we were running a workshop again - our special night-time Warwick Words writing workshop in the majestic and just a little eerie surroundings of Warwick Castle. After some spooky storytelling by torchlight in the castle grounds, we made our way up to Guy's Tower and spent time writing with various ghost-inspired exercises, including the 'Invent-a-Ghost' poem challenge. A suitable atmosphere of suspense was conjured up (no small thanks to some of the wonderful historic graffiti on the walls of the tower's room), and as midnight bells tolled across Warwick, we finished our flasks, shared the poems we'd written and retired home for the night.

Friday 8th was, of course the States of Independence (West) Book Fair as part of Birmingham Book Festival. Time flew by in blur, and much of my time was spent between stalls, readings and talks without much time to stop and take it in - it all seems a long time ago now! But it was great to see an event such as this taking hold in the West Midlands and lovely to get together with so many fellow publishers. It was also great to see many new faces there and catch up with writers and poets both known to me and new.

There seems to be a momentum behind independent book fairs right now and I hope it's something publishers can join together to keep going. As other commentators have noted, there has been much bad news for both poetry and publishing in the last year, but events such as this, I hope, may be a new and positive direction for us all. In the online age, we can often forget and undervalue how important actual face-to-face meetings with our audiences can be; the chance to physically browse new independent collections, to meet the publishers themselves as well as fellow writers and poets and make discoveries about the kind of work that is being published by contemporary presses. Writing and reading may be solitary activtites but the lifeblood of both is rooted in being part of a community of readers and writers in a literal and physical sense, contributing to and being active in that community that in whatever small way you can, whether it's going to events, buying books, reading at open mics or blogging and talking to others about reading and writing.

Thanks again to everyone who was a big part of this book fair - the book-buyers, the presses who came along, the readers and speakers they also brought with them and also to all at Birmingham Book Festival, who provided so much support and energy to help the West Midlands Publisher's Network to make the idea of the book fair a reality. Here's to next year...

We wound up the busy weekend with a peaceful and reflective workshop in the beautiful Hill Close Gardens in Warwick for Warwick Words. These Victorian pleasure gardens were rescued by a charitable trust and have been recently restored to their former glory, as the picture below illustrates:

Not only are the gardens packed with borders of abundant flowers and featuring many picturesque brick summerhouses like the one above, there are also many rare and unusual apple and pear trees there - and their wonderful names (Beauty of Bath, Shakespeare, Guelph, Ribston Pippin and Reverend Wilkes are just a few examples) informed the 'character-creating' part of our workshop.

We also popped along to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham on Wednesday 12th October and took part in a Birmingham Book Festival Fringe event with Flarestack Poets. As with the book fair, some very handsome pamphlets and books were on display in the well-stocked Ikon bookshop and we had a chat to those who dropped by to find out a little more about poetry publishing.

Finally, on Thuirsday 13th October, Angela France and Joel Lane joined us at the OU Club in Harborne, Birmingham, for a reading with Michael W Thomas and singer-songwriter Rich McMahon. Rich's powerful voice was a perfect match for the poetry and stories, which included some of Angela's biblical-inspired 'story-poems', Joel's gritty tales of Birmingham crime-noir and Michael's sharply funny poem-reminiscences of everything from his father's haphazard choice of cars to pop-bottles and pop-tunes. A very appreciative audience attended, and we had some great book sales.

So, after so much activity, you'd be expecting us to take a rest, right? Well, we've in fact more events and workshops up our sleeves to keep us busy right through the autumn and winter...

The 2011-12 Nine Arches Press Warwick Poetry Workshop programme is now online and can be downloaded in full here. We'll be running three modules of workshops from Saturday October 29th until mid April 2012, with each module kicking off with a full-day Poetry Day School. Each day-long session focuses in-depth on a particular area of poetry-writing, with 'Exploring Poetry Sequences' being the first and followed by themed sessions finding inspiration in everything from birds to maps!

All the Warwick sessions are based in peaceful and historic surroundings in the Wattlewood Room at St John's House Museum. They also include the option of taking a Poetry Surgery with the Nine Arches Press editors - bring five poems along and get in-depth feedback and advice on your work.

You can visit our workshop page here.

There's also a Leicester Shindig coming up very shortly on Monday 24th October ... I am going to post further details on this in just a moment.

As you can see, a busy autumn so far, more good things to come.

Jane

States of Independence (West) Book Fair - Birmingham

2011-09-30T11:31:00.000+01:00

Following my last post about Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, here are the full details of the Birmingham States of Independence (West) Book Fair, which happens on Saturday 8th October, 10.00am - 4.00pm and celebrates all things independently published from across the Midlands and right across the country.

The States of Independence (West) Book Fair will host around twenty book stalls, plus readings and talks with some acclaimed and well-known authors, poets and publishers. It is also totally free of charge and there will be food and drink on offer. What more could you want?

Inspired and with the support of States of Independence in Leicester (organised every March at De Montfort University by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publishing) we've been working with the kind support of Writing West Midlands as part of the West Midlands publishers' network group (comprising of ourselves, plus Flarestack Poets, Offa's Press, Tindal Street, Cinnamon Press, Five Seasons and others) to set about creating a version of the fair in Birmingham. This 'West Mids' version of the book fair is now just about to become a reality, and is also a part of the excellent Birmingham Book Festival, which launches this week.

Here's the full details, including the complete talks and readings listings:

States of Independence (West) A Book Fair in Celebration of Independent Publishing

Saturday 8th October 10am – 4pm/ Free, just drop in
Eastside Projects (Gallery), 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR

Price: Free, just come in and browse!
Books, readings, talks and so much more.....
States of Independence (West) is a book fair celebrating regional (and some national) independent publishers of poetry, fiction, art and several points in between. Come and browse the latest in independent publications, meet publishers, writers and other readers. There will be a programme of events and readings throughout the day, including panel discussions and flash readings, as well as a quiet area to relax with a coffee and your just-bought book. Set within the striking surrounds of Eastside Projects Digbeth gallery, this is a chance to explore the vibrant independent publishing movement in the West Midlands and beyond.

Publishers who will be present at States of Independence include:
Shoestring Press, Bloodaxe Books, Leafe Press, Cinnamon Press, Penned in the Margins, Five Leaves Publications, Templar Poetry, Nine Arches Press, Flarestack Poets, Sidekick Books, Tindal Street Press, Offa’s Press, Ikon, Longbarrow, Flipped Eye, Candlestick Press, Shearsman Books, HappenStance and more...

Events and readings at States of Independence (West)

Flash Space : Short Readings

11am - Charlie Hill

11.20am - Michael W Thomas

11.40am - Gail Ashton (Cinnamon)

12.00 noon - Simon Thirsk (Bloodaxe)

12.20pm - Tom Chivers (Penned in the Margins)

12.40pm - Kirsten Irving & Jon Stone (Sidekick Books)

1pm - Robin Vaughan-Williams (Happenstance)

1.20 - pm Nick Pearson (Offa’s Press)

1.40 - pm Geraldine Monk (Leafe Press)

2pm - James Caruth (Longbarrow Press)

2.40pm - Jane Weir (Templar)

3pm - Martin De Mello (Flipped-Eye)

Think Space: Short Seminars

10.30am - Life Writing? Creative Writing? Jan Fortune-Wood discusses Stale Bread & Miracles.

11am - Brian Gambles talks about how the new Library of Birmingham, opening in 2013, will engage with the region’s writers.

12pm - Poetry & Dementia: Jacqui Rowe and David Calcutt introduce us to an innovative project.

1pm - Show Me The Money: Jane Commane, Paul McDonald and Roz Goddard talk frankly about making a living out of writing.

2pm - Best Of The West: West Midlands writers read from new work -
    Caleb Klaces (Flarestack Poets)
   Joel Lane (Nine Arches Press)
   Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press)
   Dave Reeves (Offa’s Press).

3pm - The Future of Independent Publishing: Bloodaxe editor Simon Thirsk, Linus Press editor Kate Cooper and writer David Belbin discuss.

More details at: http://www.birminghambookfestival.org/states-of-independence-west-1513/

This event is a part of Birmingham Book Festival.

Kindly Supported by Eastside Projects

Eastside Projects is located here.

A pay-and-display car-park is located close by in Lower Trinity Street and the venue is about 20 minutes walk from New Street Station. Heath Mill Lane is just on the other side of the railway viaduct that crosses the Custard Factory in Gibb Street.

Please do feel free to spread the word about this event in any way you can. And do come along and browse, soak up the atmosphere, sample some fine independently-produced books and make some surprising discoveries of your own. Events such as this depend on keen and hungry book-buyers turning out and showing their support - they are also a great way to discover a little more about the contemporary poetry and literature landscape.

(You will also get to see what can only be described as a wonderful sort of wooden hobbit-house that will also double as a mini-cafe, built inside the Eastside Project space!)

See you there...

Jane

Report on Free Verse Poetry Book Fair, London

2011-09-28T15:55:00.000+01:00

Many of you will have heard about the weekend's excellent Free Verse poetry book fair in London, organised by Charles Boyle of CB Editions. Many bloggers and publishers, including Katy-Evans Bush, Matt Merritt, Penned in the Margins, Salt and Sidekick Books have written in response and praise about the fair (summing it up much better than I could do) so I won't add too much more, beyond a few words and saying a very big thank you to Charles Boyle, Anna Selby and Chrissy Williams who were all part of the organising and running of this day, and evidently put so much hard work and energy into proceedings, in turn creating a lovely buzz about the event. We were honoured to have been a part of it in our small way.

It was also a great treat to meet poets and colleagues whom I've only ever previously met online, such as Helena Nelson of HappenStance Press, Tim Love (whose blog Litrefs Reviews comes highly recommended) and to also catch up with Will Eaves, who has just launched a new collection of poems with Carcanet, which I also recommend highly. I also enjoyed very much browsing the wares of all the presses gathered there, and have been enjoying reading my various purchases and swaps from Sidekick Books, Rack Press, Donut Press and Shearsman since Saturday.

As others have mentioned, the thing that the fragile poetry ecosystem really needs right now is readership, and hopefully such events as Free Verse will not only become permanent fixtures in our annual calendar of poetry events but will also continue to reach out to real, serious readers and book-buyers. There is scope for such events to play their part in nurturing and creating new readerships for poetry too.

It's an excellent sign to see independent book fairs such as this happening all around us, and I'm even more pleased that they are finding a healthy swarm of book-buyers descending upon them, as States of Independence in Leicester (organised by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publishing annually in March) has also consistently done in the last two times I've attended too.

I hope too that Free Verse's success and very warm reception is a good omen for the forthcoming Birmingham States of Independence (West) Book Fair I have been a part of organising with Birmingham Book Festival and other members of the West Midlands publishing network group. More of that to follow in my next post, coming up soon...

Jane

Milorad Krystanovich 1950 - 2011

2011-09-23T07:52:00.000+01:00

We're very sad to report the passing of one of our poets, Milorad Krystanovich, who died on Friday 16th September after a long illness fought with so much bravery. I know he has many close friends across the West Midlands who knew him very well and who will miss this gentle, kind and generous man a great deal.

I had not known Milorad as long as most, having first met him five years ago when working for the Coventry-based Heaventree Press. His fifth collection, The Yasen Tree, had just been published and I was working to promote it around the region. Though softly spoken, he was always very happy to read for an audience and I have fond memories of him readily taking to the window of a Waterstone's branch in Coventry on a busy Saturday afternoon to read some of his poems as shoppers stopped, wondering what was going on - the photograph above was taken that day.

And what poems they are... there is a mellifluous quality to his work, which is sometimes dreamlike, occasionally haunting. Things are observed just as they take flight, unnamed characters are drifting apart and finding something in the nature of rain falling in a garden or the quality of the evening light that makes perfect and resounding sense of life. All of this without pretension or unnecessary adornment and clearly a great appreciation of nature, whether in urban or rural environments.

Milorad also loved photography and reflected this in how he captured images with clarity and detail, but also a keen economy. In a short author's note Milorad wrote about his most recent collection, Improvising Memory, he mentions how "...instead of developing films in a dark-room, I used my notebook and pen and exposed my hands to the lamplight". His poems and collections also spoke of other, darker and more troubling themes too: the deep sadness of leaving behind his homeland and family in Dalmatia in Croatia in 1992, and hints of the unimaginable suffering that war had inflicted upon the people of the region.

There was as well the concern and love of language ever-present in his work - especially the tension of two languages co-operating, never in conflict yet always in a process of refraction: of one language moving meaning through the lens of another. All good poets know the difficulty at times of getting what makes sense in our mind's eye to make sense in words - an everyday act of translation at the heart of making poetry. For Milorad, his ideas and images also had to traverse the terrain of two languages, side-by-side in an instant, before settling upon the page. His earliest collections were poems published in both Croatian and English translation, but later these collections were English alone. Milorad had told me that he drafted the poems in English but still thought the ideas in his first language, translating to the page as he composed. David Hart sums up this rare and instinctive quality of Milorad's poetic language perfectly in his foreword to Improvising Memory:

"I have found myself thinking these poems are in a condition of unstable translation, but not with any notion of their inadequacy or secondariness, on the contrary, only that they are finely balanced in Milorad’s catching of them, in their fragile and surprising making."

I have mentioned that Milorad had many good friends. A little while after his arrival in Birmingham in the nineties, he joined the Cannon Poets group who meet regularly at the MAC and have done so for many years (being one of Britain's longest running poetry groups, surely?). Here he found a warm welcome and much long-lasting friendship and support in fellow writers, particularly in Cathy Perry and Martin Underwood who have constantly encouraged and supported his writing over many years (as well as publishing his earlier collections as part of Writers Without Borders). Above and beyond this, they have tirelessly cared for and supported Milorad throughout his illness. He also made many good friends through his work at the Brasshouse language college in Birmingham and thrived in the company of writers and readers and those who loved and prized language as he did.

Quite aside from poetry, Milorad was a very prolific writer in general and had written countless manuscripts - children's fiction, young adult fiction, six short novel manuscripts, and theatre manuscripts. He'd also published a Croatian phrasebook for Collins. Even during his illness he was keen to write as much as he could, and when no longer able to do that, he was still redrafting his work (we had been working with him on a new Nine Arches collection, Moses' Footprints) up until around seven weeks ago.

We had the pleasure of working with Milorad in 2010 on his sixth collection Improvising Memory and had many good talks over tea about the manuscript - he was excellent company during these good-humoured sessions. The launch night (last May in Birmingham) came after almost a year of treatment for his brain tumour, and despite his health problems he was determined to be there and to read. It was a wonderful launch event I'll never forget. Many friends came to support by reading from the book or performing music, some of which had been inspired by his poems. Milorad arrived with literally arms full of roses (he'd told me he was bringing some flowers as gifts to say thank-you to people, but he arrived with two of the biggest bags I've ever seen, full of red and yellow roses for people, plus bouquets of roses and little pots of roses... ). He really was generosity embodied, a very kind and thoughtful man.

I'm so glad he made these memories, I'm glad he wrote so many exceptional poems and left them for us to continue enjoying. I am also glad he was able to return to Croatia last Autumn and see his homeland one last time.

Our deepest sympathy to his many friends and colleagues. He made the Birmingham poetry scene so much richer for his being a part of it, and we're all made poorer at this moment by his loss.

Here's one of Milorad's poems, which we printed, as below, with the last verse in English and Croatian on the event programme at the launch last year. This poem was sung and set to music during the launch.

Jane

Dream Gap - Milorad Krystanovich

Night streams through the midsummer
and darkens the fenced enclosure.
Not irritated by the lime tree blossom,
they sleep near the pine tree.

Coloured like the skin of the moon,
the garden is no longer their property,
not even they can tame the sky to enter
and mend their entwined dream.

Clothed only in tree flowers,
passers-by sing and dance in their clogs,
none of them halt to wake the sleepers
to listen to their steps and their song:

we cannot fall asleep and join you
in the base of dying moonlight,
not even our shadows leave
our outstretched arms,
nor can we change
this serenade into
an empty silence.

Mi ne možemo zaspati zajedno s tobom
Na kriški tla sve bljeđe mjesečine,
Čak ni naše sjenke ne odlaze
S naših raširenih ruku
Niti smo moćni zamijeniti
Ovu tužnu ljubavnu pjesmu
Za praznu tišinu.

Further poems from Improvising Memory were featured on Michelle McGrane's blog, Peony Moon.

Autumn's windfall of great poetry events

2011-09-22T16:09:00.000+01:00

This September and October will be a really great time for poetry and independent publishing. What makes me say this, you ask? Well...

First of all, this Saturday 24th September, award-winning press CB Editions are running Free Verse, a Poetry Book Fair in London at 24 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4QE from 10-5pm. It promises to be 'serious fun' with plenty of readings and lots of independent publishers of poetry involved, ourselves included. Stalls so far from Anvil, Arc, Carcanet, Salt, Penned in the Margins, PBS, Shearsman, Shoestring, Sidekick Books, Flipped Eye, Waywiser, Zimzilla, Reality Street, Waterloo and many more. Full details here.

Nine Arches poets Matt Merritt and Ruth Larbey will be reading at 12.30 and plenty of other poets will be too including, at a glance, Christopher Reid, Katy Evans-Bush and Siddhartha Bose, with the event opened at 11am by Michael Horovitz. Do come on down in you're in the vicinity and join us - show your support for independent publishing and partake in some fine poetry books and pamphlets.

Keeping in that theme of independence, I will just briefly flag up the States of Independence (West) independent publishing book fair in Birmingham on Saturday 8th October. I am going to be doing a more extensive blog posting on this in a few days' time about this, including a run down of all the readings and events that are planned, but for now, here's the quick overview:

States of Independence (West) - Books, readings, talks and so much more.....

Saturday 8th October 10am – 4pm. Eastside Projects (Gallery), 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR

Price: Free, just come in and browse!
States of Independence (West) is a book fair celebrating regional and some national independent publishers of poetry, fiction, art and several points in between. Come and browse the latest in independent publications, meet publishers, writers and other readers. There will be a programme of events and readings throughout the day, including panel discussions and flash workshops, as well as a quiet area to relax with a coffee and your just-bought book. Set within the striking surrounds of Eastside Projects Digbeth gallery, this is a chance to explore the vibrant independent publishing movement in the West ands and beyond.

Publishers who will be present at States of Independence include:
Shoestring Press, Bloodaxe Books, Leafe Press, Cinnamon Press, Penned in the Margins, Five Leaves Publications, Nine Arches Press, Flarestack Poets, Sidekick Books, Tindal Street Press, Offa’s Press, Ikon, Templar, Longbarrow, Flipped Eye and more...

States of Independence (West) has been produced by the West Midlands Independent Publishers Network, and has been managed by Writing West Midlands and Nine Arches Press. The Network includes Nine Arches Press, Flarestack Poets, Cinnamon Press, Offa’s Press, Five Seasons Press, Rubery Press and Tindal Street Press. States of Independence was first created in the East Midlands by Five Leaves Press, who have supported the Network in bringing this event to the West Midlands.

More details here. This event is a part of Birmingham Book Festival. Supported by Eastside Projects http://www.eastsideprojects.org/

Alongside this, we also have the upcoming Warwick Words festival and Birmingham Book Festival to look forward to, and the Poetry Trust's excellent winter-warmer at Aldeburgh. Sad not to be able to go to the latter this year, but memories of the last one (and the delicious plate of hot, salty fried whitebait I ate in the pub there) are still fresh and I hope to go back at some point in the none-to-distant future.

Further upcoming autumn events will be posted here soon.
Jane

Nottingham Shindig & Poetry Surgery: Sunday 18th September

2011-09-13T14:30:00.001+01:00

This weekend we'll be heading up the M1 to Nottingham for our bi-monthly open mic night, Nottingham Shindig, with headline readers Angela France, Tom Warner and Joel Lane. The event takes place on Sunday 18th September at Jam Cafe on Heathcote Street, running from 7pm with first readers from 7.30pm. Make sure you get there early to sign up for the open mic slots!

There will also be a pre-Shindig Poetry Surgery in addition to the readings and open mic slots, which has been very kindly supported by our event co-organisers Left Lion and Writing East Midlands. This writing surgery is called 'How to Get Published - everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask' and Matt and myself will be there to talk about publishing and offer advice to all novice and up-and-coming poets and writers.

This FREE writing surgery will run at the Jam Cafe from 6pm - 7pm and there is no need to book a place, just drop by. We'll be very happy to see you there and offer any helpful advice to demystify the publication process. Our aim with such workshops is always to arm new writers with the knowledge of how best to go about refining, selecting and finally submitting their work to a publisher or magazine. If you're interested in being published and want some friendly and informal advice, why not drop by? Whilst this session can't help you with the poems themselves, it does offer guidance about best practice and the pitfalls to avoid when sending out your work and seeking publication.

We're especially excited also to follow this Poetry Surgery with some fantastic readings from Angela France, Joel Lane and Tom Warner. I haven't heard Tom read before but look forward to doing so, and I'm sure the combination of Joel's tales of dark Second-City grit and Angela France's energy and precise wit will go down well with an attentive Notts crowd.

Hope to see some of you at the Jam Cafe (who, it should also be mentioned not only run a superb cafe/bar, but do a mean bacon sandwich and a wide selection of far-too-tempting cakes) this Sunday, and don't forget this event is completely FREE of charge.

Jane

Interview with Deborah Tyler-Bennett

2011-09-08T09:02:00.001+01:00

Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s previous collection was Pavilion (Smokestack, 2010), set in Brighton, and her first was Clark Gable in Mansfield (King’s England, 2003), selected poems are in Take Five (Shoestring, 2003), and a new collection, Revudeville, is forthcoming (King’s England, 2011). First poems from Anglo-Punk (sonnet sequences on Regency dandy Beau Brummell) have been published. A chapbook collection of three portraits in poems, Mytton, Dyer, Sweet Billy Gibson, has just been published by Nine Arches Press.

Your pamphlet 'Mytton... Dyer... Sweet Billy Gibson...' is made up of three poem-portraits, a triptych of characters if you like. Can you tell us a little more about all three of them?

Yes, the idea for the pamphlet was to draw together three ‘portrait’ sequences of poems from different historical time-periods (the Regency, the late Nineteenth-Century and the early Twentieth-Century). If you look at the volume as a whole certain images (bees, funerals, inclement weather, people making pictures, and local myths) re-occur throughout the three sections in differing contexts. The characters are a ‘mad’ Regency hunting Squire, John Mytton, who was known for exploits such as riding a bear into his dining room, a Cumbrian Nineteenth/ early Twentieth-Century ballad singer, Jimmy Dyer, and my Great Grandad, Billy Gibson, from Nottinghamshire.

John Mytton lived a short (1796-1834) but very memorable life, particularly for the engravers and artists who made him subject of their work, Jimmy Dyer (1841-1903) I knew as a memorable statue in Carlisle’s shopping centre, and Billy Gibson (1884-1955) through Mum’s stories of his exploits, newspaper cuttings and photographs (he had been a well-known runner when young).

What drew you to these three characters in particular, and are there any common threads between them?

I think I’m drawn to people who choose to live differently from some others, after all, I suppose that’s what poets do. The writer and drinker, Jeffery Bernard, once said that he wanted a ‘life’ not a ‘lifestyle’ and I think that’s what the three characters I wrote about in the book also desire. I’m not saying that such impulses make existence easy, in reality, John Mytton died drunk and in terrible debt, but it may mean life seldom does the expected thing.

I chose John Mytton because I found him irresistible. Once I’d read a few articles on him, and gone on to a Nineteenth-Century biography by ‘Nimrod’ (a sports’ writer who’d known Mytton) I realised I’d seen many engravings of him, on pub walls, at antiques fairs and at car boot sales. If you see a Regency Squire in a picture plunging into something, falling off something, or doing something dangerous (either alone or with his horse) it’s usually him. I also found it fascinating that people who knew him (across the class spectrum) seemed to be very fond of him, despite, or maybe because of, his extreme antics. He seems to have been a draw for writers long after his death: Edith Sitwell pictures him in English Eccentrics; and there have been new biographers. I found him a haunting presence, and one poem on him turned into many.

Jimmy Dyer, I also found enigmatic. During readings in Scotland and visits to Ireland, I’ve been lucky enough to meet ballad singers continuing the oral tradition (some of whom, such as the late, wonderful Pat Tierney, appear in the poems). As a writer for the page, work by people such as my self wouldn’t exist without the oral tradition having come first. I think it’s easy to forget, that written and oral traditions in storytelling and poetry exist in tandem, still, and that the written loses something fluid in the writing. So, writing ‘Jimmy Dyer’ both creates an imaginary picture of someone actual, but can’t hope to have the immediacy of one of his songs. What I liked about writing him, was it allowed me to pay homage to the ballad tradition that I love, whilst depicting a trail of people appearing like mist before and after him, because it’s an ongoing, living thing.

One of the people in the Dyer poems was my Great Granddad’s brother, Wem, and his dancing dog. I saw him as linking the ‘Dyer’ section to the third section, on Billy Gibson, whom, as I said, I knew from family stories of his exploits. Again, Billy was a storyteller, and stories of him were always passed down to me. I suppose the sequence was my means of passing these down.

I guess what I’m saying, is that the three characters are linked: By images that unite their sequences; and also by storytelling; extreme behaviour (Mytton setting himself alight to cure hiccups, Dyer braving vicious weather, and Billy Gibson riding his bike straight through someone’s house); and also by having been real people who the poems ‘re-imagine’. Welsh historian, Gwynne A. Williams, once said historians could be ‘people’s remembrancers’ and maybe there’s some of that in poetry, too.

One thing that comes across particularly strongly both on the page and in performance of your work is the importance of voice - both your own and that of the characters you write about. Was it tricky getting these characters to speak to you and did you use any methods to get them talking?

I think that, maybe as was hinted above, I see my work as part of a narrative/ storytelling tradition in poetry. For years some ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modern’ critics resisted the idea of ‘narrative’ as somehow old-fashioned. Yet, I think narrative poems can be extraordinarily experimental, and that for poets such as my self who are interested in depicting people, and creating voices, narrative poetry offers many opportunities to make something fresh. As for getting the characters to speak, I suppose that like many poets, the characters often ‘spoke’ for themselves and I was surprised at how their ‘voices’ ended-up on the page. I did try and use words from distinct traditions (onomatopoeic words for the noisily inclined Mytton, old Cumbrian words for plants and weather for Dyer, and my Grandparents’ Nottinghamshire dialect for Billy Gibson, favouring local phrasing such as ‘Cimitry’ (‘cemetery’)).

You've been a poet in residence and led some workshops in some quite unusual and interesting places, including at Keats House. How did this start and which one has been the most memorable and why?

I’ve been very lucky with where I’ve been asked to do workshops/ readings/ residencies, and I think some venues came up because I do a lot of work for museums and art galleries. Although this began with galleries in Leicestershire and the East Midlands (particularly for Nikki Clayton at Leicestershire’s Open Museum), I’ve done workshops and readings for venues diverse as The Usher Gallery and The Collection (Lincoln), The Science Museum, New York University Education students at The National Gallery, the contemporary gallery, Castor and Pollux in Brighton, and for AT Open House at the Brighton Fringe. Also, I’ve read twice at the Callander Poetry Weekend run by Sally King who edits Poetry Scotland, and that event with its blending of music and oral and written word (along with visits to the Scottish International Poetry Competition awards events) informed a lot of the ideas that come out in the ‘Dyer’ section of the book. It would be hard to select one venue, but two so far stand out as, like Scotland, they’ve had a lasting impact on my work.

I was asked to be resident poet for Sussex Day (16 June 2010) at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion’s Tea Rooms. Catering manager, Peter Brooks, suggested I read poems to individual tables, whilst people dined from local produce. As my volume, Pavilion, was set in Brighton, and the Squire Mytton poems take in the Regency, these were chiefly what I read. It was a lovely afternoon, and the Pavilion’s my favourite building – So it was an absolute privilege. I also think that reading to intimate tables of people changed the way I related to audiences.

I saved Keats House and the Poetry Lives Here residency (2010) till last, as it occupies a special place for me. When I was asked to be a resident writer there I was delighted, I’ve always loved Keats, and didn’t know the house in Hampstead where he spent the last few years of his life before going to Rome. Over weeks in the summer I wrote there, did schools’ workshops with fellow resident, Nick Field, who I also walked the Heath with, and read at the Keats Festival, both then and in 2011. I think that, not only were the Regency links apparent (I read some Squire Mytton poems there) but that being in the house made me think about the perspectives of writing – from both the inside and the outside. Keats also became a returning presence, and my sequence of about fourteen poems on him and the house keep growing. For a poet, his house is one of the most welcoming places I know.

Finally, as anyone who's seen you perform knows, you wear some truly fantastic vintage fashions and have a real eye for clothes and shoes (I am thinking of those amazing metallic purple heels you had on at the Leicester Shindig in August!). Where do you find all these wonderful pieces of costume and does it ever influence any of your work?

Glad you liked the gear! I started to wear my Gran and Step-Gran’s clothes from the 1950s and ‘60s, and discovered I preferred wearing them to High Street items. As with any collector, I became fascinated by clothes in flea-markets, vintage shops and fairs, and charity shops. I think clothes are so vibrant because they both flaunt and disguise. I’m very influenced by bright colours and shapes used in visual art (such as those by maximal artist, Duggie Fields, whose badges of pin-up girls, self images, and iconic contemporary figures, I often wear. Like his badges, paintings, and maximal artwork, his own style is a work of art).

Clothes influence my work a lot, as many of my characters are people who are extreme dressers – Pavilion (Smokestack, 2010) used many images of dandies, my recent sequence, The Ladies of Harris’s List, set in the Eighteenth-Century, is full of images of putting clothes on and their removal, whilst Revudeville (King’s England, 2011) had a sequence based on the colours and style of Duggie Fields. I think almost all of my poems about people use clothes to define them, from Squire Mytton’s ruby hunting coat, to Billy Gibson’s spats.

More about Deborah Tyler-Bennett

Purchase Mytton... Dyer... Sweet Billy Gibson...

"With an eye out for the singular, the wayward, the eccentric and, at times, the downright mad, Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s poetry portraits channel three very different lives and histories, whilst seeking out the faint echoes of these lives in the present. From the bear-riding Mango ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton’s attempts to cure hiccups by means of self-immolation, to balladeer Jimmy Dyer’s lonely wanderings with his fiddle, to poignant glimpses of her great grandfather Billy Gibson’s old age, these are poems that get to the essential solitude of human existence as they trace the lines of their subjects’ strange passions." - Will Buckingham on Mytton... Dyer... Sweet Billy Gibson.

Welcome to the brand new blog!

2011-09-06T11:02:00.000+01:00

We've been meaning to create a Nine Arches blog for some time, though other things like publishing, running events and generally being very busy have got in our way before now. Our first Nine Arches blog was rather basic, set up in 2008 when the press was very new, and wasn't really very good as the blogging software that came with our website package was fairly basic and creaky. There was a little less to say in those early days too, but I think it's safe to say there's plenty to say now.

So what's our motivation in having a blog now? Our website communicates a lot of the general things, our twitter account a lot of the breaking news in bitesize form, but neither really allow us much detail or space to interview poets, contain a little more about events or comment on them afterwards. So the idea here is to share a little more. And also to give readers a real behind-the-scenes tour of the goings on at a small press. It'll also allow us a little more space to tell you about new directions or upcoming publications and give you some of the background on these.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago, listening to Matt Merritt read from his superb Nine Arches collection (I know I am bound to say that, but really it is superb), hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica at the recent Leicester Shindig, that there is often so much more going on between the pages of collections than we have space to explore. That there are gaps between our own readings and what the poet can share with an audience about the process or inspiration of some of those poems. Matt read a poem about a summer evening which in fact also related to memories a friend who had very sadly died. Though I had thought I had known the poem well, I had not known this backstory behind it, which lent the poem a whole new angle of illumination. It's things like that I hope this blog will be able to do.

Publishing poetry and short stories is about so much more than just that, the publishing and putting out there of copies of their work for sale. Yet so often, we as publishers lack the space to be able to allow new angles or moments of illumination. I hope part of this blog, through interviews with some of poets and extracts from their collections, may be able to do just that.

In addition, people are interested in publishing and how a press like Nine Arches functions behind the scenes. Hopefully, this blog will give some insight. Our poetry publishing and writing advice tweets (#toptipsforpoets) were pretty popular earlier this year and there should be a little more of that on the blog. There is a lot of preconceptions, both positive and negative, about poetry publishing, and we hope to be able to explore a few more of those too.

I think that's probably enough of an introduction. Onwards and upwards!

Jane