shambles at Poetry Soc: are we bovvered?

http://displacement-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/poetry-society-and-organisational.html

Coming up for air in the middle of my long hearing ...

TIME OFF

I seem to have fallen in with lotus-eaters.

If there was something they were meant to remember

It’s long forgotten. Weekends take ages.

Strangers are included and their secrets

Are not probed for; the hosts have none of their own.

Their minds are quite unclouded by any fear

Of us holding back on facts or liking.

It’s my turn to queue for the croissants au beurre

While they make tea, put out the raspberry jam.

Pushkin in Britain

Passing the Poet's Church (St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Covent Garden) yesterday, which Peter Ackroyd has described as 'the crossroads between time and eternity', I noticed a poster in Russian and was curious.
  Inside the temperature had dropped radically and it wasn't just the cool of the dark architecture. A Russian poetry tournament was in action affecting even the climate. 'Pushkin in Britain' the title, the tournament was a weekend-long contest to find 'the king of king's of Russian poetry.' Wow!
  From the pulpit a young guy dressed in black called up the contestants. One by one they emerged from the congregation to recite. A big screen ran fairly rocky translations, but good enough to transport the reader not only to a sense of difference in place and time, but to a sense of the historic legacy unique to Russian poetry. I sat at the back with my plastic bag of shopping and the Sunday chicken could just look after itself. I was being infused with Russian melody and images, and also with memories: samizdat and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, the gulags, the great terror under Stalin and the noble part played by poetry in maintaining truth.
   'Reality,' Mandelstam wrote, 'is a continuum, and prose is a disjunct expression of it.' One of the contestant poets had a line about hiring a prostitute to listen to his poetry. There was a sense of disjuncture for this diaspora of Russian souls. Outside in the sunshine the streets were thronged with shoppers, the only imperative being to buy, buy, buy. But inside, behind the thick black walls of the poet's church, it felt like a fortunate, if counter-cultural, convergence. And then the thought suddenly struck me that perhaps I was witnessing the beginnings of something big - Poetry readings may be the next Rock and Roll!
  I don't know what the outcome of the contest was but here is a link to the site for further info.

http://www.pushkininbritain.com/

Poetry International Festival, Live Stream

From June 14th access to the live events - click on following: http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=19729&skin=pifhttp://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=19729&skin=pif

Poetry Competition

Lightship are running an interesting collection of writing comps. Here is the contact address if anyone is interested. http://www.lightshippublishing.co.uk/competitions

Sean O'Brien gave a resounding reading at the LRB bookshop the other night where Ashok and I attended to the refreshments and rubbernecked the rubberneckers. I noticed a fair share of delightful bitchiness going on between some of the minor poets who turned up. It reminded me of the theatre world I used to inhabit. Minus the sex.

Kleinzahler Gig

Saw him in last night Newcastle with Andrew, Sean-he is good value; read Snow in North Jersey which is one of his I've always liked. As Ashok said he is reading in London,(and elsewhere I think) worth getting to see him if only for his delivery and style of reading. I bought Sleeping it off in Rapid City his new selected edition.

In more detail just in case!

Do hope you can come. LG

mon 16 may, a summer chorus—with roisin tierney, jennifer martin, martyn crucefix, jacqueline saphra, geraldine paine, robert vas dias, eve grubin and carrie etter

Summer starts as ever, with a seasonal chorus of voices, familiar and new:

* Dubliner Roisin Tierney, recently returned to London from several years in Spain—pamphlet Dream Endings (Rack Press, 2011);

* Jennifer Martin has a poetry MA from Bath Spa University and was shortlisted for a 2010 Eric Gregory Award;

* Martyn Crucefix’s new (fifth) Enitharmon collection, Hurt, follows his highly praised translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (2006);

* Jacqueline Saphra’s Rock’n’Roll Mamma (Flarestack, 2008) will be followed this summer by The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (Flipped Eye, 2011);

* Geraldine Paine (b. London, lives in Kent, Glamorgan M.Phil) had her first collection, The Go-Away Bird published by Belfast’s Lapwing Publications in 2008;

Anglo-American Poetry-School-tutor Robert Vas Dias has had nine collections published in UK and US including Still Life (Shearsman, 2010);

* Eve Grubin (Morning Prayer, Sheep Meadow Press) lectures at NYU in London and is Poet-in-Residence at London School of Jewish Studies;

* Carrie Etter, latest collection Divining For Starters (Shearsman 2011). Her collection The Tethers(Seren, 2009), was winner of the inaugural, Cegin/Coffee-House-Poetry-sponsored London New Poetry Award 2010.

Anne-Marie Fyfe (Organiser)
coffee-house poetry at the troubadour
www.coffeehousepoetry.org
www.annemariefyfe.com

… life, literature and the pursuit of happiness… in the famous Troubadour basement:
London's liveliest & best-loved poetry venue…

readings MONDAYS from 8 to 10 pm, tickets £7 concessions £6,
season tickets 30% off…
cheques payable to Coffee-House Poetry at PO Box address below, no credit cards

events at: 263-267 Old Brompton Road LONDON SW5
(no mail to this address, see correspondence address below)
nr. junct. Earls Court Rd & Old Brompton Rd
nearest Tube station: Earls Court (District & Piccadilly Lines)

for information, advance booking, season ticket & mailing list enquiries,
write to Anne-Marie Fyfe
at Coffee-House Poetry, PO Box 16210, LONDON, W4 1ZP
or e-mail: CoffPoetry@aol.com