Silkworms Ink

Theatre | Critical Dahl-ings

2012-01-19T14:17:00.004Z

Last week I found myself in The Cambridge Theatre in London, watching Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Matilda, by Roald Dahl. On one hand, this confession should make it obvious that here at Silkworms Ink, a cutting-edge literary e-press, we lack the nous to track down any cultural events more significant or trailblazing than a children’s musical. On the other hand, I don't think there were actually any children present, other than onstage; the audience was rammed full of childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old adults, all of whom presumably went home afterwards and told their childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old friends that it was a show grown-ups and kids could enjoy alike.

Anyway, I did enjoy it; it was a Tim Minchin musical, with the characters singing spoofy Tim Minchin songs in Tim Minchin’s favourite registers, making sly Tim Minchin polemic digs and being, in general, about as memorable as any of Tim Minchin's tunes. But it did remind me of the rather serious structural problem with Dahl’s novel; it’s two very different stories, tenuously connected, one of which sprouts out of the other and swallows it whole just as it's running out of steam. The second, eventually dominant story is a rousing, dark schoolyard tale, in which Carrie and Sheba Hart team up to defeat a villainous 1920s portrayal of a lesbian. The first story is the heartrending tragedy of a middle-class girl born into a working-class family, until eventually their inept criminality results in their fleeing to join their innumerable comrades in southern Spain, allowing her to return (hurrah!) to her own kind.

Facile, yes, but both of the interlinked stories in the novel articulate two distinct sides to Dahl’s personality and his writings; the revolt of Matilda and her classmates against Miss Trunchbull is a characteristically dark and funny, rather wonderfully skewed fairytale in which the righteous young heroine actually gets to defeat the monster after the rescuer/woodsman figure (Miss Honey’s father, heroically named ‘Magnus’) has already been tragically swallowed up by it. Matilda’s psychic powers come out of nowhere halfway through the novel and never seem to relate thematically to her intelligence or her love of books; rather, they rise from her impotent fury at adult injustice, her innate sense of fairness and strength evolving into the power required to overcome the villain. And Trunchbull is, indeed, a fine villain, perhaps Dahl’s best; he could create a grotesque character without blinking, but like so many great monsters, the hulking headmistress is as pitiable as she is terrifying, an insecure obsessive who, similar to his Twits and Witches, regards children as an undefined species of louse - memorably visualised, too, by Quentin Blake as a buttoned-up mass of brawn just barely keeping its balance on two pin-slender legs.

Matilda’s parents, however, have no such complexity; they’re bingo-playing, used-car-selling scumbag stereotypes who loathe their own daughter and her love of books mainly in order to give Dahl an excuse to bitch about television, a subject he thoroughly enjoys. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I seem to remember, contains a room devoted to television for no other reason than to horribly punish Mike Teavee, a small boy who, as you may have guessed, watches too much TV. Afterwards, the Oompa Loompas, serving as Greek chorus, caution parents to throw away their own sets. A brief reminder:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!

There’s a triple irony in there; one, in advocating that an escape from reality via literature is somehow intrinsically of higher merit than an escape from reality via television, two, that it was written around the time of Nigel Kneale’s first glorious genre pieces and Dahl’s own Twilight-Zone-esque anthology series ‘Way Out’ (now available online; it's really rather good), and three, that a spiel about the medium of film rotting the brain was written by the man who inflicted You Only Live Twice upon the brains of adults and children everywhere.

You can really tell this was written by someone passionate about creating intellectually challenging artforms.

I can’t bring myself to like this posturing, sneering Dahl any more than I like Boris Johnson for his godawful poetry collection The Perils Of The Pushy Parents, which steals openly from him;

Loving parents, learn from me.

If your children crave TV

Tell them, OK, what the hell

You can watch it for a spell ...

IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.

SON, I'M TALKING IN CAPITALS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU MUST COME TO ACCEPT THE INNATE SUPERIORITY OF ONE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OVER ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ANALYSING QUALITY ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IT MUST BE TRUE. I READ IT IN A BOOK.

There will always be an argument, which is to me at least part-convincing, that Dahl was a nasty man. It is, in fact, almost obtuse to point out that a highly-refined nastiness of spirit is what is so often utterly glorious and appealing to children and adults in his work, from the giants that reach into kids’ bedroom windows and gobble them up to the macabre turns of his Switch-Bitch stories.

What’s a little sad, though, is that when we’re young we read his books as a sensational dive into a land of horrors and marvellous weirdness; we don’t pay attention to the crude attempts at messages (I’m not sure Charlie And The Chocolate Factory scared me off watching television as much as my quaking fear of changing the channel and accidentally encountering Gene Wilder in the film version), we don’t really take in the uncomfortable fact that the Oompa Loompas were originally gurning, simpleton African pygmies, and we probably don’t find ourselves sitting through a children’s musical about an extraordinary genius being held back by a society that encourages mediocrity, thinking, ‘Hang on, this is the exact plot of The Fountainhead’. Maybe, despite the popular cliché, Roald Dahl’s books demand to be read and loved while you're young and before you start to panic about his politics.

Chapbook | Vol LV, Mo (Movember Special Edition)

2011-11-30T16:56:00.000Z

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol LV, Mo

Mo: Special Movemeber chapbook from Silkworms Ink. Featuring Corey Mesler, Nicolas Pillai, Kyle Hemmings, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé and Teresa Chuc Dowell.

The chapbook is free for your enjoyment, but please consider throwing a couple of quid into the Silkworms Ink Movember fund raising page - HERE

Movember: Day 28 Update

2011-11-28T17:38:00.000Z

Nicolas 'The Horseshoe' Pillai - Film Editor

James 'Chevron' Harringman - Editor

Nearing the end of our Mo days now. We have raised a fantastic £185 so far, which I think is pretty good work. Although it's not over yet, so please chip in a few quid here.

The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

2011-11-17T20:01:00.000Z

DOWNLOAD HERE

Welcome to The Voyage, an innovative new anthology of writing by staff and postgraduates from both Monash in Australia and Warwick in England. We believe all writing, at its best, is creative writing. To that end we have drawn our distinguished contributors not only from English and Creative Writing but also from other departments in Humanities, from our Faculties of Science and Social Science, and from our Administration. What's more, we invited writers and scholars who have some practical connection with Warwick and Monash from both within and outside the academy.
We were open to all forms and genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction including scholarship and biography, drama and most other forms of creativity you might imagine. We were happy for our contributors to write on any theme but we think that the core of the book is what it means to journey. These might be imagined or remembered journeys, physical or metaphorical journeys, or journeys into knowledge or across time.

See a video introduction of the book by editors David Morley and Chandani Lokuge here. Further, find below a series of readings by selected authors reading their contributions to this wonderful anthology.

Movember: Day 15 Update

2011-11-15T20:47:00.000Z

James Harringman, Editor

Nicolas Pillai, Film Editor

Day 15. About half way through and I am proud to say we have raised £135 so far. I'd like to think that, now we are actually armed with fund raising moustaches we can do better in the second half.

It is all for the excellent cause of Prostate Cancer awareness, so please chip in HERE

Movember: Day 10 Update

2011-11-10T21:08:00.000Z

Nicolas Pillai - Film Editor

James Harringman - Editor-in-Chief

We have reached day 10 of our upper-lip shaving abstinence. I don't think either of us is worthy of the cover of Moustache Monthly quite yet, but the month is young. The reason for all this remains the same, to raise awareness and as much money as we can for The Prostate Cancer Charity. If you can spare some dollar, pound or yen, please drop it in the e-collection pot of the Silkworms Ink 'Mo Space'- link below. Thank you!

DONATE HERE

Silkworms Ink does Movember

2011-11-01T21:45:00.000Z

This month Silkworms Ink will be supporting the Movember movement.

What?

"During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.
On Movember 1st, guys register at Movember.com with a clean-shaven face and then for the rest of the month, these selfless and generous men, known as Mo Bros, groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine moustachery. Supported by the women in their lives, Mo Sistas, Movember Mo Bros raise funds by seeking out sponsorship for their Mo-growing efforts."

Why?

"The Movember Effect: Awareness & Education, Survivorship, Research The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers - prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research."  

For more information on the programmes Movember funds please visit the following: 

The Prostate Cancer Charity 

The Institute of Cancer Research 

Awareness & Education 

Global Action Plan

What we have planned…

It's a secret. Although, surprise, surprise, we do have a few moustache themed tricks up our sleeve for the coming month. Stay tuned.

Day 1

Myself and the excellent Nicolas Pillai will be representing the Silkworms. Follow our upper lip adventures as we give you regular updates throughout the month.

We start here on November 1st. Clean shaven.

James Harringman. Editor-in-Chief

Nicolas Pillai. Film Editor

Let Mo Season Commence.

Fiction | A Noun Of Nouns

2011-10-18T20:09:00.005+01:00

(Spoilers. As ever)

In this rather sweet, in-depth interview with an Israeli newspaper, Salman Rushdie talks at length about that fatwa (you know the one I mean), his writing, religious influence in modern society – and the state of television, which is where he offers one of the most hilariously transparent self-justifications for lying on the sofa binging through fourteen hours of Prison Break I think I’ve ever seen:

"I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes."

I have this wonderful image of Rushdie, clutching an extra-large bag of Minstrels, pressing ‘next episode’ for the umpteenth time on the Dexter DVD menu, and telling himself, ‘This is an artistic exercise. I’m forcing myself to do this for the sake of my noble craft.’ Anyway, in the same breath Rushdie also politely demeaned HBO’s The Wire, claiming it was ‘just a police series’; naturally, this latest act of blasphemy caused a moderate internet hoo-hah, and he’s since agreed on Twitter that he’ll ‘watch another series’ of the show to see if he was wrong about it. (So you didn't watch it all the way through? Clearly not that committed to the artform, then, eh, Salman, you posturing dilettante?)

Yo, I know people be saying Midnight's Children is a multi-faceted analysis of India's awakening of independence through the medium of magical realism, but in the end, that shit is just a fucking superhero book.

Rushdie also said,

“There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun. In the end, it's well-produced trash, but there's room for that, too.”

Once again, the award-winning author sounds like he’s desperately trying to explain why he Tivoed the entire thing, though frankly, ‘I’m watching it for the violence and the nudity and because it's sort of cool’, isn’t quite as defensible as ‘I have to watch it for work’. But, of course, he’s quite right on both counts, and I can feel comfortable saying that, as I have myself now worked my way through both the HBO series and two-and-a-bit of George R.R. Martin’s exceptionally long books. A Song Of Ice And Fire, as the entire series is known, is at times quite exceptionally trashy, no matter how many Guardian articles appear claiming that the fantasy genre has "grown up" by including moral shades of grey for the first time, like, ever.

That’s not to be hard on the series. As a matter of fact, I think it contains several of the fantasy literature elements that China Mieville found so lacking in Tolkein in this famous Socialist Review article; it largely refuses to deal in moral abstracts, it replicates the cruelties and uncertainties of reality rather than meandering away into escapism, and it’s been crafted with that marvellous conviction and lunatic obsessiveness to detail that old JRR also had, that enables a world to feel not simply vivid, but possessed of a past, a present, and a future.

One of its real problems comes with the world itself, which steers mostly clear of supernatural elements (which is a perfectly fine idea) in favour of a variety of faux-medieval locales and civilisations pillaged from Planet Earth, occasionally down to the most pointlessly copycat details (desert dwellers in the east ride camels; a flamboyant, foreign fencing instructor talks like Inigo Montoya). And when Martin does venture into high fantasy, it’s consistently with the most worn-out and over-familiar tropes and creatures. Dragons, giants, faithful wolves, broadswords called ‘Ice’ and ‘Longclaw’…to be fair, there’s also something called a grumkin, but it’s never actually described, and is, woozel-esque, deemed to be a fairy story. Most frustratingly of all, Martin tries to keep us interested in monstrous ‘Others’ lurking in the wilds beyond civilisation, long after he’s already played his big reveal; and it's turned out, disappointingly, that the Others are undead zombies. With blue eyes. And they want to kill the living, because of something something darkness.

However, it's the style of the books that's the series' biggest stumbling-block, tending towards the sombre, the stilted and the flowery with the occasional bizarre bit of American slang or anachronism thrown in; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't at all, but more often than it should, it results in action sequences that have no real sense of weight, movement or space. It does improve, admittedly, as the series goes on (the first book has a lumpen, linebreakphobic attitude towards its paragraphs and contains three separate uses of the phrase ‘there was a sickening crunch’) but even then, for every pleasant sentence, like one about an army spreading out over hills like ‘an iron rose’, we get a,

“Tyrion could not have been more astonished if Aegon the Conqueror himself had burst into the room, riding a dragon and juggling lemon pies.”

-a sentence that couldn’t have been worse if an unknown quantity had ridden in on a cliché, hurling a bad attempt at comedy into the middle of a serious scene instead of just expressing a simple and recognisable sensation, that of astonishment.

But – and here comes the other side of the coin – it is, indeed, quietly addictive. Some of the main heroes and villains are thoroughly enjoyable company - though in such a large cast, it’s inevitable that others suffer by comparison (a lot of secondary and tertiary male characters are just Ser Glowering The One-Dimensional, quite a few of the female characters are 1) sexually-liberated shagpots 2) power-hungry villainesses 3) heroic tomboys yearning to prove themselves on the field of battle, there’s at least one too many callow youth, and the children all have to have a ‘young’ voice to differentiate them from the adult characters, which results in some awful R.L. Stine-esque passages like, ‘”You STUPID STUPID STUPID,’ she thought”). The storytelling element itself, weaving multiple plot strands and motivations together, is generally beyond reproach (though there’s some business in the first book with the ownership of a dagger that never really makes sense). And Martin looks like a genuinely nice fellow, a sort of scraggly, filled-out version of Doc from Snow White.

In fact, he probably only comes second to Jack Vance in the 'cuddliest-looking fantasy author' stakes.

I don’t know if I’ll read any more of the series, for now, at least – another colossal, multi-part tome is calling, and its name is 1Q84. But one final concern strikes me; since the very beginning of the very first book, A Game Of Thrones, the author has been playing up the idea of a fast-approaching threat to the entire world, a ‘winter’ that brings with it the evil Others. Five books of the planned septet have been written, and nothing seems to have moved on that front; instead, the world has expanded and expanded, creating more factions and plot elements that have yet to be resolved. ‘Winter is coming’, characters keep insisting; fifteen years and 4839 pages later, it still hasn’t bloody turned up.

Perhaps Martin will never actually follow up on that Chekhov’s Gun, but it’s so central, and it’s been so heavily built-up, that I couldn’t see that being anything other than an appalling anti-climax. But if he does send his undead beasties out on their prophesised rampage – then guess what? A Song Of Ice And Fire becomes just another story of various kingdoms and wandering heroes putting aside their differences and standing together against an abstract evil that rises out of a terrifying wilderness. Which wouldn't sit well with the idea of fantasy 'growing up' at all.

Television | Fresh Meat - What The Hell Was That?

2011-09-22T00:17:00.001+01:00

Well, I don’t know what to make of that.

Even now, as I sit, snuggled up in my own bedclothes, reading tweet upon tweet from quite a number of apparently real-life, comedy-appreciating human-beings about how much they enjoyed Channel 4’s new student comedy-drama Fresh Meat (what the hell does that even mean, ‘comedy-drama’? Is it just suggesting that it’ll be less funny than a comedy’s supposed to be, with more shots of people falling back against their beds, staring wistfully up at the ceiling about how they haven’t got together with that other person who’s also currently falling back against their bed in a brilliant mirroring shot, all while Jose Gonzalez moans faintly from somewhere in the sideboard?), I just don’t know what to make of it.

So this is comedy-drama, right? Less jokes, more cinematography?

To begin with a positive, the first episode, containing as it did no real plot other than a refreshingly unfamiliar ‘boy and girl can’t bring themselves to say how they feel about one another, both act foolishly as a result, hurt each other’s feelings’ story arc, did strike some pleasant, familiar notes. The student house, hideously narrow and high and baige, filled with furniture both antiquated and childish, felt very much like a genuine student house. The awkward atmosphere of people trying to forge a new, post-school identity for themselves was just right.

But then there were the bum notes, and here I can touch upon a long-standing theory of mine that the university experience, much like sex or dreams or philosophical discussions conducted under the influence of narcotics, does not translate well into a story told to others. That which we remember as being hilarious/erotic/terrifying/deeply profound often turns out, when we relate it to outsiders, to be just lame. Presumably Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, for instance, knew someone at uni who used to go around the pub asking people for a dribble of their pint until he had a drink of his own. ‘Hilarious!’ they chortle. ‘Remember how funny he was?’ No, Bain and Armstrong, I, the audience, don’t. I’ve never met anyone like that. You've just based a comedy routine on the kind of anecdote you'd run away from at parties.

I’ll admit – the fat Scottish man just baffled me. At first it seemed Bain and Armstrong wanted to make him the off-the-wall, semi-autistic, scene-stealing character. Cooking Peking duck in the nude! Just like everyone remembers from uni. Then he became a stingy, parasitic sort of student character, in the pint-dribbling sketch. Then it became clear that they needed Joe Thomas from The Inbetweeners (oh, we’ll get to him) to have a male character to take advice from in the legally required ‘boys and girls sit separately, talking about sex and each other’ scene*, so he became a comic sidekick and wingman. Then he started farting mischievously on the toilet. What is this character supposed to be, Bain and Armstrong? He isn't anything at all.

But what had me actually shouting at the screen was the straight guy role. Or, rather, all three of them, because what audience really want to see in comedy is lots of ordinary people with no distinguishing characteristics.

The first of these straight guys is a blonde girl. The second is a brunette girl, who is differentiated from the blonde girl by her occasional lying about things that don’t matter. The third is Joe Thomas, and as if to make it very clear that the writers aren’t going to bother doing anything more interesting with them than replicating his lovelorn character from The Inbetweeners, he gets described as ‘lonely’ and ‘sexually frustrated’ before we’ve actually seen any evidence whatsoever of that. Now, the blonde girl and Joe Thomas seem to like each other, so we have a (boring) sense of where they’re going to go forward as characters. Other than being the focus of a crap little plot based on ‘isn’t it terrible when people copy your work?’ that could just have easily have been given to the blonde girl, I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of the brunette girl is. At one point, she also admitted to liking Joe Thomas, but this was never brought up again. So out of seven main characters (six if the joke about the missing housemate is that he’s never seen) three of them are ‘normal’. In a comedy. This is not a good idea.

The last two characters were fine – that is to say, they had clearly defined personalities. Even if I’m not sure how far ‘from a rough background (hilarious!), reacts to everything with a dull stare and dull monotone’ can be stretched out over an entire series. But Jack Whitehall was surprisingly convincing, if rather cartoonish, as an insecure, posturing, posh sod who might well encourage collective masturbation over biscuits.

What’s really, really not fine, though? Another bloody ‘Evil Dean’ character whose only role is to thwart our heroes at every turn, his motivation being that he's all mean and evil and stuff. Seriously. Come up with something new.

It hasn't been funny since Dean Bitterman in The School Of Hard Knockers.

Also not fine is the show’s title, which allowed for a very cute butcher’s window series of adverts, but which seems less memorable and more meaningless every time I think about it. Is it meant to be a dick joke? Why not just ‘fresh’? Honestly, it sounds like something a rapist would call university students.

Maybe I’m being unfair on a new show; it certainly has potential, and talent behind it. But, Twitter, either I’m mad or that was a baggy, directionless, mostly unfunny forty-five minutes of comedy(-drama).

*Coupling, famously, managed to stretch this one scene out over three entire series.

Wider Reading | Interview With Mark Burnhope

2011-08-17T15:19:00.000+01:00

With the world on tenterhooks over the imminent re-launch of Silkworms Ink, I thought it might ease some of the tension to have a good old-fashioned interview. And by old-fashioned I mean conducted online whilst using another window to choose appropriate images to Photoshop. Ah, the good old days.

This weekend we’re fortunate to be joined by the poetry pamphleteer, blogger and all-round decent bloke, Mark Burnhope, to talk about putting together his debut for the Salt Modern Voices series, as well as touching on literature’s loners, theology and Wallace Stevens.

Phil Brown: Afternoon Mark, and thank you for joining Silkworms Ink for the interview. To start things off could I ask you to introduce yourself to our readers?

Mark Burnhope: It's a pleasure to be here, thanks for inviting me. Hello readers. I write poetry and reviews. I'm an occasional painter and illustrator; and recently, I've probably been using the word 'kaleidoscopic' too much.

Phil Brown: The Salt Modern Voices series has some astoundingly talented new writing in it (yourself included). How did your place in the series come about?

Mark Burnhope: That’s a good question. I had my first poems published in Magma 48, just last year. Soon after that, I messaged Chris Hamilton-Emery on Facebook, just to say thanks for the books; they're collector's items, my shelves are creaking under their weight, and they'd really helped me along. In the next months, I was published in a few online magazines, I jumped on a lot of thought-provoking poetry discussions on Facebook, and he must have spotted my work somewhere. We got talking, and he asked if I wanted to put a pamphlet together. I'm thrilled, and very proud to have been chosen for the series, considering how long (or not) I've been published.

Phil Brown: What were the biggest challenges in putting together your own pamphlet?

Mark Burnhope: All I'd done before was to put together submissions; so, four or five go together in an email, and you might put what you think is the best at the top. That's pretty simple. But finding firstly what you think are your best poems, and then trying to bring together thematic strands on a larger scale, was a challenge I hadn't taken up before. I knew I couldn't have two poems doing 'the same thing', however few I thought were good enough. So, having enough good poems, then making them all do their own job in context, as well as being muscular enough on their own. Yeah, that was a new thing. I hope I got it right, to some extent.

Phil Brown: In your debut appearance in Magma, you have two poems, ‘Twelve steps towards better despair’ and ‘Deliverance’. Could you briefly take us through the thought process that lead you to picking one of those poems for your pamphlet, but not the other.

Mark Burnhope: Actually, 'To My Familiar, Queequeg' was in Magma as well. But as for why I didn't choose ‘Deliverance’: I'd written it from an impulse to respond personally to Andrew Philip's 'The Ambulance Box', as a poem but also as a collection. In a sense, I shared the experience of the loss of a child (miscarried, in my case) and the grief that goes along with that, and I wanted to try to address it, for myself as well as part of a process of learning to write something expressive as well as readable. I was very glad that it was deemed good enough to publish; I'm aware of the hazards of writing slightly personal stuff, because someone's got to read it. In terms of the pamphlet, I felt that it would have done too much of the thematic work by itself. I wanted these poems to be in conversation with each other, and together to add up to that emotional impulse. ‘Deliverance’ was probably doing more crudely what The Snowboy does as a whole pamphlet, I think. The Snowboy is central to the collection, and he sort of melts into all the subject-matter and themes surrounding him.

Phil Brown: The art of making poems in a collection converse with each other whilst speaking for themselves can be one of the most delicate equations...

Mark Burnhope: Indeed, and let's just say I haven't found a painkiller strong enough to get me through that process in a first collection yet.

Phil Brown: One of the thematic strands that runs through your pamphlet is an affinity with literature's outsider figures - Quasimodo, Queequeg, The Little Black Boy, Pinnochio. What is it that draws you to these particular figures in your writing?

Mark Burnhope: I know that the ‘outsider figure’ is a literary idea, but I’m not sure I was consciously thinking about that. I am interested in outsider poetries simply because they acknowledge that sometimes things can’t be said in the ways they have been. Language needs reformation all the time, even melding with visual art, in order to fully reflect and speak for, or about, anything in an increasingly complicated culture. I’m interested in ‘anti-poetries’, in a way, which aren’t trying to be obscure (even if they are), just trying to be honest. It doesn’t take effort to think about outside status for me, I just do. I try to deal with separate shards of living as an outsider though, and to bring them together in my writing. There’s a sense in which disabled people are ‘in the world, not of it’ – to bastardise a Bible phrase – that we’re inherently part of society, but pushed into the margins at various levels. I try to confront that, even if just on the level of language. Maybe that says something about my desire for social equality, I’m not sure. The pamphlet sprung from two contexts, really: disability and religion.

When those clash together, you tend to get a tidal wave of prejudice. These outsider characters allowed me to draw together and explore these strands, because they, or their stories, touched on metaphoric aspects around belief – stereotype, xenophobia, sexuality, disability. These characters became vessels to embody these things. (I’m interested in words and poems as vessels for embodiment rather than just tools for description.) 'The Little White Poem', with an epigraph from 'The Little Black Boy', is kind of a satirical admittance to just how much of our tradition is white (whiteness is a motif in a few of the poems), and just how much our reflections on that -- poetic or not -- are wholly inadequate to address the real problems. Who am I to speak about these things? These are just poems, and ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, according to father Auden. It’s almost an apology for that.

Phil Brown: By interrogating so many famous loners and outsiders from the world of literature, are you subscribing to the idea that poets, by the very nature of what they do, have to be 'outsider' figures?

Mark Burnhope: Not really. To my mind, poets can be whatever they like, as long as the poems are effective in some way. I have a wide taste, and I value the mainstream: it's what got most of us into poetry, what stirred us to originally dive in, isn't it? So that's extremely valuable. But then, as I said, I also like avant-garde, strange stuff occasionally, not just because it’s strange, but because it honours complexity: a poet should be able, if he / she wishes, to deal with difficult subjects in an appropriately difficult way. So no, I don't feel the need to identify with the 'persona' of outside poet, but I do want to write honestly. Of course, that means that if a poem is extremely ‘clever’ but has forgotten to feel anything, I probably won’t take it much further, or I’ll change direction: ‘The Ideal Bed’ was going to be different, before I suddenly realized that for all its language play, it didn’t have any heart as it was. It’s very much more emotionally honest now, even if still a bit strange and suggestive.

Phil Brown: You open the pamphlet with a quotation from Wallace Stevens, who certainly had a fraught relationship with the poetry 'establishment' of his time. To what extent have Stevens and the modernists been influential on your work?

Mark Burnhope: I chose that quotation because it represented the title poem, but also addressed the reader, captured spirituality, and grief. So the line seemed all-encompassing for the whole book’s context. I love Stevens’ often over-the-top musicality: loads of assonance, alliteration. That stuff makes his poems serious (and this one’s pretty serious), but vibrant and hilarious as well. I love that he often deals with faith material, but he’s anarchic and witty in the way he challenges received religious certainty (all real faith should embrace a little agnosticism, or even a lot). 'Anecdote of the Jar' is just a Still Life poem about reflection(s), in one way; but in another, it describes a massive, *almost* magical realism transformation, where this object envelops the landscape. I've tried to take all that stuff into these poems, I think. One of the first things I absorbed when I first started workshopping seriously was the importance of the image, thanks to Pound and the Imagists, and Carlos Williams’ 'no ideas but in things'.

As far as Modernism in general goes, I spend a lot of time on the Internet, so a lot of my reading is sporadic. I tend to flick from poem to poem, poet to poet, rather than fully absorbing these massive movements (though I’ve been trying to rectify that for a while). So I’m not sure how helpful it is to make generalizations about Modernism or American poetry. Modernism is a couple of hundred years of poets, and America is a big place. So I take from Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot, Stevens, but then I scoot across to Confessionalism: Plath, Sexton, Lowell. At the beginning, that came out of the music I listened to, a lot of Seattle Grunge and Metal. Then I got a bit older, and learned the hazards of such writing, especially if one wants to be read. But I hope that honest frustration and difficult feeling is bubbling under the surface in my work. I hope that I've got what I like about Confessionalism through, in a gritted-teeth way, because I also try to be funny and joyful. Incidentally, just to go back to Lowell: I remember reading that he didn’t think he was Confessional at all. He was interested in strong, outspoken confession, but he wasn’t always using his own life material, and he was very prepared to fabricate and invent stories in order to get at emotional truth. I’m a bit like that myself, I think. So was Plath, contrary to popular opinion (myth, the land, fictional character, all served her). So confession is just another tool. If a poem is any good, it’s not self-indulgent gimmickry but a valid plea for some bloody honesty in the world.

I’m also into bits and pieces of the postmodern, avant-garde, most recently the Black Mountain movement, and their idea of page as field. I love Larry Eigner's take on that particularly, not just because he was disabled, but because his disability was an inherent part of his aesthetics and craft. It was a tool, just like the others. That fascinates me and I’m planning on pursuing it further, thinking about how one might apply it to other poetries which spring from disability.

Phil Brown: ‘The Snowboy’, as a poem, could be seen as quite confessional.

Mark Burnhope: Yes, partly, although it’s deliberately distanced by third-person. Stevens’ poem 'The Snow Man' developed my thinking about it. One of my family (I can’t remember who exactly) built this snowboy during the Christmas my partner had a miscarriage a couple of years ago. I remember staring at this structure one morning, by the time the sun had warmed the air, and the figure was deteriorating. It struck me as this perfect symbol for the silent but seething grief I felt, for a life which was never 'living', but was still a real, concrete, made thing. My partner’s pregnancy had been fairly miraculous, considering what doctors had said were my chances of fathering a child (virtually nil). I was suddenly conscious that miscarriage seems often undermined as something that ‘just happens’, instead of the tragedy that it is.

There’s this flippant ‘Don’t worry, you can just try again’ attitude, which, like a religious doctrine, isn’t a one-size-fits-all truth. That seemed to be something nobody wanted to talk about. Snowmen seemed similar, in my strange head. You can’t write a poem about a snowman! Cliché! ‘The Snow Man’ has been done before. There was Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ There’s also Raymond Briggs' 'The Snowman', which is beautiful, but it’s kids’ stuff. But the melancholy in Stevens' 'mind of winter', and even the ‘kids stuff’, was ironically very appropriate, so I knew the poem had to be written. I was drawn to solve this problem, that despite the danger of triteness, I had to get on this snowman bandwagon. ‘The Snowboy’ couldn’t be made ‘clever’, either. It had to be exactly what it was: a monument to death. If I couldn’t capture this thing without affectation, I wouldn’t bother.

Phil Brown: As well as snow and literary loners, 'the sea' becomes an important recurring theme in the pamphlet. Where does the sea fit into the thematic schema of 'The Snowboy'?

Mark Burnhope: Well, the clever-clever answer is that I'm interested in the problem of unhelpful dualities: mind, body; physical, spiritual; able, not able. Duality crops up in rhetoric and thinking around both disability and religion. Town and sea are one of these imagistic dualities that I dot around. The simple answer, though, is that I just love sea literature: Herman Melville, Hemingway, right through to Philip Gross, and everyone else writing sea poems now. People talk about ‘saturating the market’ with this, that or the other, but no; there could never be too many sea poems. Personally, I find almost perfect peace by the sea. I've lived in Bournemouth for a couple of years now, having moved there from Coventry, after having lived in London. The space and tranquility compared to the rush of the city is staggeringly cathartic. Also, it's exciting to be a part of somewhere with a literary history, particularly with Thomas Hardy and 'Wessex' in its centre. That makes place another thing I can't help but respond to. Of course, London has an incredible literary history as well -- Blake, for one -- but my move to Bournemouth happened around the same time as a massive increase in my desire to write and read very seriously, with an intention to be published.

Phil Brown: In 'Dream Invertebration' and 'The Serpentine Verses', the poetic 'I' shares an affinity with Scorpions and Snakes. Is this Ovidian branch to your writing a result of your theological background?

Mark Burnhope: Possibly, yes. I'm interested in animals, firstly. I love animals and I love animal poems. It's often been a frustration (I don't think that's too strong a word) that animals, when featured in poems, are often used crassly as metaphors for apparently more important 'human stuff'. I'm all for their use as symbols, especially in Biblical literature. But symbols are more encompassing than metaphor, and less of a straightjacket. Rather than narrowly implying that animal stands for human, I want them also to be completely themselves. Drawing on animals as mythological figures can occasionally be problematic; it can undermine their inherent 'animalness'. Why can't an animal just be an animal? Does this say something about our felt dominance over them (dominion being a big idea in traditional Christianity)? This leads me, I suppose, to be interested in knocking animals from their mythic soapboxes, just letting them crawl around on the floor and be animals.

Phil Brown: But in the lines

My legs fuse to form a scorpion tail,
rainbow over my itchy, flaky scalp in a way

they couldn’t of course, not even over a sofa.
I quiz her on further matters maybe less
conducive to this telling. Only, she’s trying

to fiddle the door lock with a feather, I guess

in the fear that I might otherwise sting her.

Surely you are playing with the mythic/semiotic qualities of a scorpion, rather than using it from a purely biological stand-point?

Mark Burnhope: Oh yes, absolutely, but ‘playing’ is a good word, because sometimes I’m doing it ironically. In ‘The Serpentine Verses’, I’m removing the snake from its original biblical context, and bringing it into a mundane, everyday one; deflating a myth, and making it just normal. My serpent is just an observer, unable, or just not bothered, to speak. It’s doesn’t take on an allegorical role. It colours the poem, gives it shape and structure, but its presence is morally neutral. It’s just a ‘seer’, looking on this act of love – this mutual submission of man and man. You can read further intention into it if you want (I am affirming same-sex marriage, for one thing), but here’s what happens: it’s a normal night, on a normal street, in a normal house. In the Bible, the Garden of Eden represents the world as it existed; I’ve brought the outside in, and this ‘world’ is just a couple’s house. These men are about to fuck, and a snake crawls into the room unnoticed, and then slinks out again. That’s it. The scene is trying to be beautiful for its unremarkable plainness, as is, I guess, the disabled body.

In ‘Dream Invertebration’, I'm hoping the inherent ridiculousness of this kind of metamorphosis comes across. Laurie Clements-Lambeth, in her collection Veil and Burn and particularly in the 'Reluctant Pegasus' sequence, writes about how myths and fabrications can be made around the body to support our feelings about it: embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust. In her poem, she reflects on the labels which can be pinned to the disabled body, and which ones she won't, or might inevitably have to, accept as descriptors for herself. ‘Dream invertebration’ came out of a dream someone had of me once (I can’t remember who) in which I wasn't in my wheelchair. I'd just forgotten to take it with me, left it at home (How?). Instead, I was walking on my hands. My ex wife and I were laughing about that, and I said something like: 'It's funny that I was walking on my hands, rather than just sitting on a sofa.' You know, people often say 'Oh, you're in a wheelchair?' and I often jokingly say 'Well, only during waking hours.' So the poem is really about what others imagine a wheelchair-user doing when they're not being a wheelchair-user... whatever one of those is. It ends by me having a poem critiqued on the Internet, based on that dream, and my critters being more interested in my wheelchair (which didn’t happen either, by the way, so the poem might also be about my paranoia that it will). In the end, my openness about my disability has backfired. I’ve stung myself.

Anyway, so yes: the ‘I’ is just a person. The scorpion is just a scorpion. It’s the whole ridiculous construct, the events of the poem, doing the work of meaning… if you wish them to, that’s up to you. The poem ‘Our Jonah of Boscombe Pier’ came from the apparently true story about some guy who walked over a beached whale’s back in the middle of last century, right on the beach where I live. But my whale is just a whale. I speculate that the reason this guy jubilantly walked over it was to have some kind of mythic, religious experience of identification with the old whale tales, literary and Biblical, but the importance of that idea is undercut right at the end by a sexual innuendo. ‘Queequeg’ is a poem where the whale is more than just a whale, but Melville did some of the legwork there. I just rode him, as it were.

Phil Brown: As a writer with a physical disability, do you feel obligated to deal with issues of disability in your poetry or is it something that organically finds its way into your work?

Mark Burnhope: I have Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus, yes. 'Obligated' isn't the word, though; writing poetry in the first place isn't an obligation. For me, disability is a context from which I write, a lens through which I see the world. I'm aware that as soon as you say, 'I write about disability', some people will assume you have an agenda, or are on a soapbox. So I try to write from, rather than ‘about’ disability. Really, all poetry, all language, is culture-bound. Nothing is written in a vacuum and we can't help that. So yes, it's natural. I don't make a conscious effort to write ‘disability poems’ (if that’s what they are), and certainly I went through other ideas before finding that disability was becoming a recurring theme in the ones I was collecting together.

My disability is an inevitable, completely mundane fact that I see no reason to deny, if I can manage to avoid the pitfalls. It’s how I live experience. All of our senses are filtered through our bodies, and there’s no generic body. So disability is an inevitable part of my work, sometimes, even when that’s not explicit and there is no ‘I’ (who of course needn’t be me anyway). I sometimes write 'I wheeled' rather than 'I walked', not because I want to say 'Hey! I'm disabled, remember?' but because I hope to make the reader more comfortable with the idea, neutralise it really. (Same goes with ‘spacker’, ‘cripple’ or even ‘fuck’.) Maybe there’s an element of redressing tradition as well. There's a lot of poetry about walking, but I don't walk. I'm not going to say I walked when I didn't, and I see no reason to wish I had in my poems. Other disabled people have a different approach, preferring to use 'walked' as a generic way of saying 'travelled', but that's mine, unless there's a good reason to speak about walking, as in 'Dream Invertebration', where I'm hardly walking in a conventional way anyway.

Phil Brown: And there is definitely the sense that the art of poetry is often concerned with defamiliarisation... and it can be of great benefit to encourage people to compare their take on 'mundane' with others'.

Mark Burnhope: Exactly. One person's mundane is another's exciting, and vice versa. A lot of people are excited by difference. But I’m trying to be honest, not different.

It’s worth me saying that my thinking about disability doesn’t have a great deal to do with naming or describing impairments (hence why so many of my poems are about construction, built things, bodies other than mine, bodies of water and land). There is a difference, in disability discourse, between two ‘models’. There’s the traditional Medical Model of Disability, which categorises us by our conditions and impairments. That’s only useful, really, for the medical industry. I try to write from the Social Model – first given a name in the 80’s, I think – whereby it is our environment which disables us. The opposite of an enabling environment is a disabling one. Prejudice, ignorance; lack of access to jobs, services, buildings: if all those things didn’t exist, the word ‘disabled’ might become obsolete, and we’d all just be people. If that sounds like I’m talking about Utopia, that’s because I am.

But talk to the majority of physically disabled people themselves (attitudes vary, in mental health or deaf community for example), and that social model reflects an overwhelming majority way of thinking about their lives. That idea – that however diverse in our bodies, we share a vast amount of common experience, and that’s what binds us – allows me to open the umbrella to talk about all prejudices I’m concerned with, including those religious hot potatoes. The Social Model provides a framework, a landscape, and the materials to build upon it.

Phil Brown: Your career as a poet has got off to a great start and your pamphlet is clearly the work of someone with a strong future in literature. Do you have plans for a full length collection in the future?

Mark Burnhope: Thank you, that’s very kind. Yes, eventually. At the moment, though, I'm happy to keep trying out the magazines, write reviews, read reams and reams. I have a lot to learn; too much poetry, not enough days in the year. As far as collections go, I've been playing around with a couple of other pamphlet ideas. I'm excited by the potential of the pamphlet, as an object and artefact, really; I'm excited that they can contain ideas which are organic and might change. They're snapshots sometimes, a working through of aesthetics maybe not fully-formed yet. I'm happy to stay in that territory for a good while before I bite the first collection bullet, I think.

Phil Brown: If somebody wanted to write a poem that was the exact opposite of the sort of poetry you write... what would they have to do?

Mark Burnhope: Something which was entirely skeptical -- nay, downright dismissive -- of feeling. The first poetry I loved was William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas: the impulse to speak about God, suffering, the land and our place in it. These days, there are so many barriers against delivering that kind of material effectively. I suppose, to be my antithesis, you'd have to give up trying, or just not be interested. You'd have to treat the poem entirely as an academic exercise. Speaking of which, I don't think I've used the word 'kaleidoscopic' once during this interview, have I? Sorry about that.

Mark Burnhope’s debut pamphlet, The Snowboy (Salt), is available to buy now.

Silkworms Ink 2.0 Teaser #1

2011-08-04T16:21:00.000+01:00

Silkworms Ink 2.0 Teaser from Philip Brown on Vimeo.

No, we aren't starting a series of Tom Waits assassinations, nor are we starting a series of dedications to Poetry Society interns or my girlfriend's new housemate (both of whom are lovely Marthas in their own way). We do however, have an exciting new partnership with a poet I respect and admire to be announced officially in the coming weeks which is going to rock your world... or at least get you to come to a few more live events.

Stay tuned.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

An open letter to readers of the popular new writing website, Silkworms Ink

2011-08-01T22:23:00.000+01:00

RIP Lucian Freud, a man who wrote excellent letters

Friends,

We were intending to post this a week or three ago, but then some Society had some sort of Meeting (or something) that got a bit shouty, so shouty that NOT A SINGLE PUNCH WAS THROWN, and so we decided to let Phil ‘EGM’s most affable bachelor’ Brown splash around the blog by himself for a while. And hasn’t he done well? Welcome, readers new; we’re thrilled Silkworms’ #PoSocEGM coverage has been useful, and look forward to showing you around the new site come the autumn (same goes for you, regulars and old hands, obviously).

The new site. More on that later. First, a bit of recent history.

Prior to THE IMPLOSION OF POETRY, we’d gone a bit quiet, having spent the preceding year and a bit spraying out shimmering new writing and incisive commentary on an almost daily basis. Friends, the flow had dwindled to a trickle. Silkworms As Was was a thrilling, if slightly chaotic place to be: a platform for a weekly mini-zine comprising of short articles about poetry, fiction, music, film and theatre, along with a chapbook of new work, a literary mixtape and a very small essay. Each riffing off an arbitrary theme (to revisit some of these, open your exercise books here). All four (then six) Silkworms editors were spending the time we had rifling through submissions, commissioning new work, and filling in the gaps with our own writing. Without giving ourselves the opportunity to ask: why? Why are we throwing all this stuff into the internet.

It took putting together chapbook L, our fiftieth, fattest, most well-connected publication yet – and being forced to slow down in order to worry about previously IGNORABLE things like subbing and COHERENT ORDERING and so forth – to make us realise…

We didn’t want to be just another blog-led website with a publication arm stuck onto it, like the poems on of our 100% cotton t-shirts. We wanted to really grab hold of and bloody utilise the new technologies and ever-expanding networks we’d taken for granted for 400 days – in a way that they hadn’t been utilised before. To help us metamorph into the first fully-realised, fully-streamlined, fully-equipped, fully-electric publishing house willing to dedicate itself to the catalysing, editing, writing, producing, displaying, reframing, curating, polishing, SWILLING AND SPITTING OUT of genuine eclectica. To help us do, in short, something different.

That was, and remains, the plan. A plan that clearly requires a great deal of time to be spent on development, commissioning, collaboration-making, path-clearing etc. in preparation for our MASSIVE RE-LAUNCH, scheduled for the end of the summer. In our first month of (relative) quiet, we’ve achieved a great deal, and designs have been refined, functionalities conceived, books written, venues booked and several other things. In our second month, we intend to finish off achieving these ends, and find at least five more ends to achieve. By the end of August, at least twelve ends will have been achieved and then, THEN we can talk. Hopefully you’ll find a place to read, to write, to talk, to listen, to reflect, to lurk, to learn, to forget, to offend, to plot…

So anyway, at this midway point between Silkworms 1.0 and Silkworms 2.0 – Silkworms 1.5, then? – we thought it would be polite to remind y’all of where we were, to let you know where we’re going, and to keep you reasonably abreast of what we’re doing at the moment. (Beyond offering indispensable resources for PoetryGate rubberneckers the world over.) So that when you have a think about who you’d like to publish your next collection of poems with; or who you’d like to propose an investigative or scholarly project to; or who you’d like to work with on your PARADIGM-REDEFINING idea for an event; or who you’d like to host the best thing you’ve ever written alongside the best thing a bunch of other people have written…

So that when you have that think, you think of us. Seriously, our future depends on the input of brilliant people – and as soon as possible, because we can’t keep rinsing the brilliant people we’ve already worked with (as brilliant as they are). So start a conversation, and let’s see where we can take it: submissions@silkwormsink.com

We look forward to talking to you all, throughout August, and then exploding from our silky chrysalis before autumn descends. Until then,

James, Phil, Jon, Sam and Rowan

Editors, Silkworms Ink

A rather less excitable reflection on Silkworms’ genesis, chapbook ‘L’ and the phenomenon we’re rather predictably calling The New Publishing can be perused in the latest issue of Arts Professional magazine, behind (alack) a paywall. We’ll liberate the article here in a few days’ time.

Poetry Society 1000 Votes Reached

2011-07-31T23:39:00.000+01:00

Poetry Society Petition Reaches 1000 Votes from Philip Brown on Vimeo.

A short video of thanks to all who got involved with the recent petition put forward by George Szirtes.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM - Who's Signed So Far?

2011-07-31T10:31:00.000+01:00

A cloud of support

Have you signed yet? These guys have...

1000. Ella Duffy 999. AJ Ashworth 998. Laura Fernandez-Kayne 997. Tinashe Mushakavanhu 996. Michael Scott 995. Chris Port 994. Ben Cartwright 993. Anjali Desai 992. Carole Bell 991. Simon Barraclough 990. Ra Page 989. Sue Spencer 988. Natalie Haynes 987. Jane Schaffer 986. Richie Brown 985. Robert Mullen 984. Peter Doyle 983. Imtiaz Dharker 982. Denni Turp 981. Fiona Beaton 980. Linda Black 979. Robert Beake 978. Jean Johnstone 977. Wendy Milne 976. Ian Blyth 975. Norman Bissell 974. Jacqueline Bradley 973. Julia Webb 972. Felicity Brookesmith 971. Robert Alan Jamieson 970. Terry Kelly 969. Jean Johnstone 968. Richard O'Brien 967. Laura Marsh 966. Maurice Riordan 965. Leela Soma 964. Shawn Mulachy 963. Anthony Farmer 962. Miriam Johnson 961. Daniel Barrow Barrow 960. Pey Colborne 959. Sonia Hendy-Isaac 958. Lesley Cookman 957. Ken Homes 956. Sharon Champion 955. Gwyneth Lewis 954. Heather Jones 953. Charlotte Geater 952. Victoria Ramsay Ramsay 951. Marilyn Ricci Ricci 950. Robert Doughty 949. Mary Hamer 948. Rachel Davies 947. JANET BAIRD 946. Annabel Chown 945. Lindsay Balderson 944. Philip Fried 943. Rob Lowe 942. Helena Petre 941. Heather Neill 940. Graham Burchell 939. Andrea Holland 938. Peter Halliwell 937. Jamie Jones 936. Sally Warrell 935. Rebecca Farmer 934. Eric Beston 933. Peter Davis 932. Annie Fisher 931. anne-marie fyfe 930. Cahal Dallat 929. Angela Rees-Jones 928. Bohdan Piasecki 927. Rebecca Guy Ver 926. Patience Agbabi 925. David Thomas 924. Margaret Speak 923. Susan Mackervoy 922. Andy Jackson 921. The Itinerant Poetry Librarian 920. JULIE O'CALLAGHAN 919. DENNIS O'DRISCOLL 918. patrick mcGuinness 917. Kenny Knight 916. Helen Dewbery 915. alicia stubbersfield 914. Miriam Scott 913. greg delanty 912. Matilda Leyser 911. Ann Atkinson Atkinson 910. Graham Mummery 909. Lawrence Sail 908. Michele Poet 907. Mary Stacey 906. Barbara Randall 905. Jim Dening 904. Simon Altmann 903. Timothy Walker 902. Jonathan Barker 901. helen constantine constantine 900. Katie Fesel 899. Ann Alexander 898. Hannah Copley 897. Bob Dew 896. Nadine Brummer 895. Elaine Borthwick 894. Benjamin Scott 893. Daniel Powell 892. Jennifer Hunt 891. Trish Davis 890. Peter Mortimer Mortimer 889. Jane Kite 888. Neil Astley 887. Joshua Allen 886. Susanne Chowdhury 885. cary archard archard 884. Sophie Yeomans 883. Pat Borthwick Borthwick 882. Paul McLoughlin 881. diana wilson 880. Nick Jarvis 879. Caroline Cook 878. Hannah Thomson 877. Don Paterson 876. Gabrielle Hatfield 875. Sarah Kemp 874. Donald Atkinson 873. Paul HYLAND 872. John Tufail 871. John Brown 870. David Brown 869. Esther Morgan 868. Caitlin Heffernan 867. Lyn Stephens Stephens 866. Jane Monson 865. Matthew Gregory 864. Tim Cockburn 863. Bill Greenwell 862. Clive McWilliam 861. Doug Robertson 860. Sue Rose 859. Hugh Dunkerley 858. Geoff Hands 857. Bill Trüb 856. Miki Byrne 855. Jenny Gladstone 854. Sarah Dallat-Laverty 853. maura dooley 852. Avril Staple 851. Stewart Conn 850. Julia Copus 849. padrika tarrant 848. Marc R. Sherland 847. James Goodman 846. Bill Greenwell 845. Sophie Hannah 844. Joelle Taylor 843. John Osborne 842. Rosalind Fairclough 841. Anthony Martel 840. Ruth Wiggins 839. Michael Skaife d'Ingerthorpe 838. Clive Watkins 837. david and helen constantine 836. Andrew Forster 835. Samantha Christie 834. Cahal Dallat 833. Nessa O'Mahony 832. Jane Draycott 831. Emily Dening 830. Ramona Herdman 829. Chris Scott 828. Gregory Dowling 827. Vicky Kimm 826. Marianne Burton 825. Nicholas Murray 824. Heather Danson 823. matthew lanyon 822. victoria bean 821. Caroline Gilfillan 820. Melanie Drane 819. Rachel Mikos 818. Alison Brackenbury 817. Lucy Collins 816. Kathleen Bainbridge 815. Janan Saab 814. Lynn Roberts 813. Ted Millichap 812. Phil Barrett 811. Jane Duran 810. Philip Gross 809. Helen Cherry 808. Jacqueline Saphra 807. Bobby Parker 806. Grevel Lindop 805. John Haynes 804. Mary Rozmus-West 803. Charles Lauder, Jr 802. Martin Alexander 801. dan wyke 800. Catherine Gardner 799. Alan Hayes 798. Keith Roberts 797. Rose Flint Flint 796. Matthew Rice 795. Beverley Kemp 794. Tiffany Atkinson 793. Steve Thomas 792. Judith Marsh 791. Sophia Roberts 790. Bill Swainson 789. Theo Dorgan 788. Charles Christian 787. Russell Turner 786. David Borrott 785. Emma bragginton 784. Lavinia Greenlaw 783. Steve Rudd (inventor of Potty Poetry, poet, visionary and seer) 782. Siofra MaCherie 781. Jerry Carr-Brion 780. Llinora Milner . 779. Rosemaris Jesson 778. Elena Kaufman 777. Carol DeVaughn 776. Emma Lee 775. Anneliese Emmans Dean 774. Juliet England 773. Olivia Waldron 772. Richard Parkinson 771. Robin Taylor Gilbert 770. Maria Bennett 769. Margaret Wilmot 768. Fahima Sahabdeen 767. Chris Meade 766. Siobhan Evans 765. David Wheatley 764. John Lucas 763. Jeff Taylor 762. Rosie Godfrey 761. Shirley Jones 760. B Wheeler 759. stuart pickford 758. Jeremy PAGE 757. Naomi Alderman 756. Sheila Preston 755. Diane Simkin 754. Valerie Striker 753. Sarah Duckworth 752. Marcelle Olivier 751. Nigel Fortune 750. Frances-Anne King 749. Linda Marlowe 748. Jane Knights 747. Roger Boylan 746. Joanna Wilsher 745. Judy Prince 744. Desmond Clarke 743. Fleur Adcock 742. Ian Pindar 741. Stuart Charlesworth 740. David Oprava 739. Noreen Drake -Stoker 738. kaaren Whitney 737. BARBARA DORDI DORDI 736. Cathy Moore 735. John Harrison 734. Nicole O'Driscoll 733. Duncan MacLaurin 732. ANN Gray 731. marion tracy 730. Edward Fox 729. Kate Bonfield 728. Keith Armstrong Armstrong 727. Michael Loveday 726. Mary Gilonne 725. Christine Coleman 724. Robert Holbach 723. Christine Wain-Heapy 722. Jo Field 721. Howard Young 720. Benjamin Morris 719. Alana James 718. Lisa Gee 717. Bev Robinson 716. caroline richardson 715. Dot Cobley 714. Glyn Davies 713. Jenny Hutchings 712. Wendy Klein 711. Bernie Morgan 710. Sarah Passingham 709. Jennie Bailey 708. Tom Stevenson 707. Paulene H 706. Pauline Keith 705. Neil mac Neil 704. Michael Horovitz 703. Tim Parks 702. Berko Berkavitch 701. John Smallshaw Smallshaw 700. Sophie Mayer 699. Richard Crockatt 698. Richard Roberts 697. Val Dunmore-Francis 696. Mark Cobley 695. Jenny Hope 694. Valerie Darville 693. ZOFIA DYMITR 692. Adam Wyeth 691. Annie Bishop 690. pippa little 689. Roger Collett 688. Michael Hutchinson 687. Tom Gardner 686. Josh Williams 685. Pippa Chapman 684. Frances Spalding 683. Lisa Wilson 682. Alice Huzar 681. Mark Bond-Webster 680. Melanie Prince 679. paul askew 678. Susie Burns 677. Brian F Docherty 676. Darrelyn Gunzburg 675. Veronika Bowker 674. Helen Szirtes 673. Roger Thompson 672. hugo lambton 671. Simon Smith 670. Rachel Hore 669. Lorna Thorpe 668. Carole Coates 667. Kona Macphee 666. Nigel McLoughlin 665. Ian Crockatt 664. Sasha Dugdale 663. Frances Clarke 662. ALISON MILLER 661. Marina Warner 660. Henry Fisher 659. Julian Turner 658. Jonathan Davidson 657. Morag Styles 656. 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Julie Corbett 503. Jo Radcliffe 502. Luke Kennard 501. Wayne Holloway-Smith 500. Lesley Ingram 499. Anna Robinson 498. Sally Goldsmith 497. Jennie Osborne 496. Corina Papouis 495. Calum Kerr 494. Nick Stone 493. Valerie Josephs 492. Elizabeth Rimmer 491. Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch 490. Jessica Van Doremalen 489. Eleanor Livingstone 488. James Sutherland-Smith 487. Helen Lawrenson 486. jules wilkinson 485. Rebecca Perry 484. Jane McKie 483. Rose Hawley 482. Celia Mitchell 481. Maureen Jivani 480. Robbie Guillory 479. Stewart Hildred 478. Christopher Barnes 477. Hayley Newman 476. Pam Zinnemann-Hope 475. Nancy Campbell 474. Rupert Lally 473. Mandy Haggith 472. Geraldine Green 471. Simon Craft-Stanley 470. Edmund Matyjaszek 469. Dafydd Pritchard 468. Brian Johnstone 467. Herman Deetman 466. Ashley Lister 465. Brigid Smith 464. Andy Willoughby 463. Nikki Magennis 462. Maggie Butt 461. Michael Schmidt 460. Susan Wicks 459. Simon Armitage 458. Choman Hardi 457. Kevin Crossley-Holland 456. Alyson Hallett 455. Robin Bowles 454. Douglas Houston 453. harriet proudfoot 452. Patricia Oxley 451. Ruth Aylett 450. Will Carr 449. John Mackay 448. Andrew Biswell 447. Martin Burton 446. Stephen Elves Elves 445. Douglas Houston . 444. Adam Strickson 443. Jessica Holifield 442. Catherine Burton 441. Keith Parker 440. Ian McLachlan 439. Cathy Strawson 438. Lance Pierson 437. Steven Waling 436. Claire Crowther 435. Lynne Rees 434. Katherine Venn 433. Aaron ben-Joseph 432. Rusty Gladdish 431. Stephen Tunnicliffe Tunnicliffe 430. Simon R Gladdish 429. Alex MacDonald 428. Ute Penny 427. Alwyn Marriage 426. Jenny Price 425. Deborah Alma 424. Sylvie Sims 423. Zoe Redgrove 422. Stephanie Norgate 421. Jenny Shepherd 420. Abegail Morley 419. Jon Turney 418. Helen Taylor 417. Roselle Angwin 416. Ann Drysdale 415. Kate Fox 414. Jen Wainwright 413. Sandy East 412. Petra K 411. Diana Reich 410. Peter Forbes 409. David Peter 408. Anna Kisby 407. will stone 406. VICKI FEAVER 405. David Morphet 404. Rob Spence 403. Nick MacKinnon 402. River Jones 401. Daffni Percival 400. Arabella Harvey 399. David Chapman 398. Geraldine Paine 397. Rodney Wood 396. C J Driver DRIVER 395. Richard Price 394. Marion McCready 393. Jehane Markham 392. Richard Livermore 391. Margaret Beston 390. Charles Bennett 389. William Ayot 388. shirley may 387. mao oliver 386. Kate Noakes 385. Maura Hazelden 384. Sarah Jackson 383. Antony Dunn 382. Tamar Yoseloff 381. Colin Will 380. John Glenday 379. Fran Martel 378. Claire Dyer 377. Ira Lightman 376. Ani Jackson 375. Jon Gamble 374. Laurie Smith . 373. Erika Glenday 372. Michael Mackmin 371. George Roberts 370. david lebor 369. ALISON BRACKENBURY 368. Sarah Miller 367. Laura-Jane Foley 366. Donna Collier 365. Jonathan Ng 364. Van Howell 363. Al Barz 362. amanda bellamy 361. Joy Ill 360. Pauline Rowe Rowe 359. Chris Gribble 358. Carole Humphreys 357. Eliza Gregory 356. James Harringman 355. Julie Boden 354. Jon Stone 353. angela Readman 352. Pamela Robertson-Pearce 351. Luke Smith 350. Jack Underwood 349. Joan Hewitt 348. Aine MacAodha 347. Alan Baker 346. Nicki Hastie 345. Kate Compston 344. joe sherman . 343. James Gardner 342. A C Clarke 341. Morelle Smith 340. Jenny Swann 339. David James 338. Julia Gaze 337. Daphne Williamson Williamson 336. Nicky Guthrie 335. Richard Woodcock 334. Alison Miller 333. Lorraine Mariner 332. Morag Massey 331. Frances Causer 330. Angela France 329. Helen Dunmore 328. Dom Waters 327. Liane Strauss 326. Barbara Farley 325. Tom Richardson 324. Peter Howard 323. Polly Atkin 322. Edward Power 321. Mark Roper 320. Karen Dennison 319. Penelope Young Young 318. Victoria Heath 317. Robbie Burton 316. Norbert Hirschhorn 315. Alastair Niven 314. Ian W King 313. james Grant 312. Mark Granier 311. Paul Claridge 310. Alexander Mcmillen 309. Kim Morrissey 308. Zaffar Kunial 307. hazel buchan cameron 306. Professor Diane DeBell 305. Marius Kociejowski 304. Fiona Finlay 303. Alastair Cook 302. Valerie Laws 301. derrick porter 300. Sean McCann 299. Pamela Johnson 298. Pat Jourdan 297. Sabine Pascarelli 296. Pascale Petit 295. Tony Turner 294. Andy Ching 293. Jen Hamilton-Emery 292. Matthew Johnson 291. Phil Simmons 290. Justin Coe 289. Joanna Watson 288. Elly Nobbs 287. Alexandra Buchler 286. Cliff Yates 285. Colette Bryce 284. jane colman 283. Jocelyn Page 282. Ben Holden 281. Linda Parkes 280. will kemp 279. Stevie Ronnie 278. Dorothy Yamamoto McCarthy 277. Victor Tapner 276. Jane Routh 275. Zoe Benbow 274. Leih Steggall 273. Patrick Widdess 272. Amanda Dalton 271. Sophie Breese 270. Matt Merritt 269. Charlotte Beyer 268. Charlotte Kirin 267. Anthony Fisher 266. Valerie Morton 265. felicity alma 264. Rosemary Barrett 263. Elle Zwandahl 262. Angela Topping 261. Julia Copus 260. Roy Cross 259. Colin Begg 258. Roz Quillan Chandler 257. Bethany Helen Durham 256. Hilary Elfick Hilary Elfick 255. Adrienne Odasso 254. Sarah Westcott 253. Jean Sprackland 252. Matt Bryden 251. Heather Holden 250. John Thake 249. Deej Fabyc Art 248. Isabel White 247. Les Bell 246. Jonathan Wonham 245. Davina Prince 244. Christopher North 243. Rob La Frenais 242. Anthony Howell 241. Jan Bay-Petersen 240. ripa haque 239. Adrian Rice 238. Zoe Piponides 237. Hugh Bryden Bryden 236. Fawzia Kane 235. joanna walsh 234. Nicola Bray 233. Mónika Mesterházi 232. Pc Evans 231. Tony Keeton 230. Kate Scott 229. Carolyn Jess-Cooke 228. Kathryn Maris 227. Joanne Limburg 226. Gail Cameron 225. Alex Pryce 224. Rahil Anwar 223. Charlotte Gann 222. Kate Clanchy 221. Mal Dewhirst 220. Peter Richards 219. Clare Crossman 218. Caroline Carver 217. Roddy Lumsden 216. Ron Scowcroft 215. Annie Kerr 214. joan michelson michelson 213. Amy Key 212. David Wilkinson 211. helen oyeyemi 210. Ingrid Andersen 209. Jenny Lewis 208. Gill Learner 207. Naomi Foyle 206. carole satyamurti 205. Frank Bright 204. Carmel Waldron 203. Strider Jones 202. john weston 201. Michelle McGrane 200. JOANNA BOULTER 199. Zoe Brigley Thompson 198. Tim Reid 197. Derek Adams 196. S.V. Wolfland 195. Katie Moudry 194. Maria McCann 193. maggie sawkins Sawkins 192. Roz Goddard 191. Deryn Rees-Jones 190. Owen Sheers Sheers 189. Charlotte Hartung Nolsoe 188. Clarissa Upchurch 187. Sarah Salway 186. Jo Bell 185. Sullivan the Poet 184. Jules Mann 183. Helen Gregory 182. David Floyd 181. Helen Ivory 180. Edmund Prestwich 179. Max Wallis 178. Laura McKee 177. Iain Stewart 176. BRYAN OWEN 175. louise hill 174. MARILYN LONGSTAFF 173. Nigel Pollitt 172. Shirley Lee . 171. June English 170. Mark Burnhope 169. ann Kelley kelley 168. Yara Delinquent 167. Rik Wilkinson 166. Lynda How 165. Tim Turnbull 164. Tammy Ho 163. Wendy French 162. Chris Allinson 161. Liam Carson 160. Emily Hasler 159. Kate Potts 158. Judi Sutherland 157. Mark-Sue Lozynskyj 156. Fiona Moore 155. Sascha van der Aa 154. Lindsey Holland 153. Andrew Philip 152. Lesley Saunders 151. Alan Garvey 150. Timothy Adès 149. Lindsay Fursland 148. Nicolas Williams 147. Jackie Litherland 146. Christina Patterson 145. Jon Sayers 144. Lindsey Thomas 143. Paul Ranford 142. JAMES FLYNN 141. Agnes Lehoczky 140. Peter Berry 139. Anne Maney 138. Liz Loxley 137. Denise McSheehy 136. Julia O'Brien 135. Diana Gittins 134. Niall O'Sullivan 133. James Womack 132. Atar Hadari 131. Jane Dobson 130. Stephen Wilson 129. Vanessa Lee 128. Claire-jane Carter 127. Elaine Ruth White 126. John Clegg 125. Jonathan Briggs 124. Matthew Sweeney 123. audrey ar ardern-jones 122. Lisa Gershon 121. Sue Dymoke 120. Chris Holifield 119. Nicky Phillips 118. Claudia Daventry 117. Vanessa Weedon-Jones 116. John a'Beckett 115. Roger McGough McGough 114. David Belbin 113. Sarah Gooderson 112. Sue Guiney 111. Mary O'Donnell 110. marek urbanowicz 109. joelle taylor 108. Chris Considine Considine 107. Jim Barron 106. Jane Holland 105. Peter Ryley 104. julie-ann rowell 103. John Wheway 102. Matthew Francis 101. Peter Daniels 100. Anne Cluysenaar Cluysenaar 99. Alistair McCulloch 98. Sally Baker 97. Bernardine Evaristo 96. Diane Slaney 95. Michael Shann 94. Mark Niel 93. Sandy Solomon 92. Davena Hooson 91. Patrick Early 90. donald gardner 89. Roderic Vincent 88. James Hamilton 87. Kevin O'Neill 86. Michelene Wandor 85. Rowan Fortune 84. Julia Bird 83. Katy Evans-Bush 82. Catherine Brennan 81. Andy Booobier 80. Gregory Woods 79. Isobel Dixon 78. Jan Fortune 77. chris gutkind . 76. Victoria Cichy 75. Lucy Lepchani 74. Meryl Pugh 73. Fitch O'Connell 72. Martin Figura 71. Keith Lander 70. Gerry Cambridge 69. Jeremy Page 68. Claire Trévien 67. Marilyn Francis 66. Nina Boyd 65. Susan Atkins . 64. Graham Mort 63. Leona Medlin 62. menna elfyn 61. Adam Horovitz 60. Michael Swan 59. DR BOAST 58. Clare Pollard 57. Karin Koller 56. Anne-Marie Fyfe 55. David Kirk 54. Carole Bromley 53. Chris Preddle 49. Jill Townsend 48. Richard Deakin 47. Rebecca Scambler 46. Joy Howard 45. Justin Gowers 44. Norman Andrews 43. Dante Micheaux 42. John Snelling 41. Gabriel Griffin 40. Josephine Dickinson Dickinson 39. Lucy Wood 38. Alessio Zanelli 37. Neil Astley Astley 36. Michael Spilberg 35. Clive Birnie 34. Jane North 33. Sheenagh Pugh 32. Diana Pooley 31. Janet Fisher Fisher 30. Mark O'Brien 29. Paul McGrane 28. Lyn Moir 27. Nancy Hynes 26. Phil Brown 25. A.F. Harrold 24. Tom Chivers 23. LUCIUS REDMAN 22. Wayne Burrows 21. Barry Tempest 20. MAURICE RIORDAN 19. sally evans 18. Ros Barber 17. Bert Molsom 16. Lydia Macpherson 15. Anne Berkeley 14. Carrie Etter 13. Poetry Society 12. Pippa Hennessy 11. Louise Wilson 10. Chrissie Gittins 9. John Siddique 8. Polly Clark 7. Judith Chernaik 6. Tanya White 5. penelope shuttle 4. Anne Vinden 3. Chris Hamilton-Emery 2. Eva Salzman 1. Donna Sparrowhawk

Poetry Society EGM - Broadsheets to the Wind

2011-07-30T12:55:00.000+01:00

An interesting thing happened a couple of days ago. I read an article in Civil Society with the headline Poetry Society Issues Full and Frank Explanation of Dispute. The 'Full and Frank Explanation' being referred to was the one read by John Simmons at the EGM... the one that was subsequently picked apart and scrutinised as a whitewash of trustee incompetence. That full and frank explanation.

I wrote to Civil Society, asking if their article had taken into consideration Judith Palmer's statement or indeed the audio-recording from the EGM. And guess what happened next...

The article was instantly modified to include a more even-handed account of events which referred to Palmer's statement and the secondary sources surrounding it... and I got an e-mail of thanks from the article's writer. "I have been in touch with the press officer all morning and all of yesterday and they neglected to advise me that this had ever been posted".

It would appear that Civil Society is not the only periodical to allow for a modified stance on the situation. I draw your attention to the following pieces:

Guardian Letters - Betrayal of Trust at the Poetry Society
The Independent - A row that shouldn't hide and important truth: poetry matters
Civil Society - The Poetry Society Issues Full and Frank Explanation of Dispute

Whichever stance you choose to take in this debate, I think it serves as a fascinating example of how PR and the work done by PR companies has shifted from solid to liquid to gas in the age of Web 2.0 where the long tail wags the dog.

If you have not already, then I suggest you read Kate Clanchy on paranoid poets and this message from Anne-Marie Fyfe, former chair of the Board of Trustees. Both are important, well-written documents in and of themselves, but there is equal value in the representations of conflicting opinions occurring in the comments sections. Irrespective of people's personal bias, everyone involved in this conflict cares about the future of poetry.

NB. At time of writing the petition to reinstate Judith Palmer has 874 signatures.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

A Call for Judith Palmer's Reinstatement

2011-07-27T17:06:00.000+01:00

CLICK HERE TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THE PETITION

Following my coverage of last week's Poetry Society EGM, the poet, ecologist and all-round top bloke, Professor David Morley, sent me the message 'you have done noble work but the story behind the story is still not told. It will come out eventually.'

This has come at least partly true today, thanks to the lengthy statement released by Judith Palmer which I have reproduced at the end of this article. Palmer's stance is adamance that a dispute between herself and the Poetry Review Editor was by no means the catalyst for the current situation, but rather incompetence and bully tactics from the Board. One of the more interesting / unpredictable things to arise from this statement is Todd Swift's reaction to it on Eyewear.

'The poets who organised the Requisition act as if they were blameless, but they are at least half the problem, in terms of bad PR. The media would hardly report a case of boardroom scuffling in a small arts organisation - but a widely-distributed email campaign to challenge the Trustees, well, that's news. In short - the damage that is being done is being done by these trickles and gushes from Facebook, email, and blogs.'

-Todd Swift's blog

George Szirtes has begun a petition to reinstate Judith Palmer, which you can sign by clicking here if you so wish. At time of writing it has 115 signatures. If I can be forgiven for interjecting with my own personal opinion here - if I were in Palmer's position then I almost definitely would not take the job back, nonetheless I think that anyone with an ounce of gratitude for the fine work of the Poetry Society under her direction needs to sign this petition now, or at least after you have read her statement.

Statement from Judith Palmer
(taken verbatim from The Poetry Society UK Blog)

On Friday 22 July 2011 members of the Poetry Society recorded a resounding No Confidence vote in its Board of Trustees at an Extraordinary General Meeting called to discuss the ramifications of the recent spate of resignations at the organisation. One of those resignations was mine, yet the Board neither invited me to attend nor to present my evidence to members. In the hope of ensuring that the meeting stayed focused on the Board’s alleged reckless financial mismanagement, and on the urgent need to call this to account to protect the Society’s future, I forwarded only a brief outline statement. Given comments made at that meeting, I would now like to expand on this here.

On 19 May 2011 I reluctantly resigned from my position as Director of the Poetry Society. I explained my reasons to the trustees, stating:

“I loved the job I had, and the team I worked with. I was proud of our achievements and was looking forward to delivering the 4-year programme which had just been agreed. In a few weeks, the Trustees’ unilateral decisions, have made the Society a very unhappy and unproductive place. There’s total confusion. Non-executive trustees have unilaterally taken over responsibility for areas of my job. Agreed staff procedures aren’t being followed. Funding relationships are being mishandled. I’m no longer free to run the organisation using my professional judgement, and under these circumstances I cannot be held responsible, if the organisation begins to fail.”

Decisions were increasingly being made that I had no knowledge of or influence in – decisions made outside the contexts of normal, open, minuted meetings. I had a duty to carry out the instructions of Trustees, but found myself unable to reconcile this with my obligations to staff, funders, and members.

When I left, the Poetry Society was in excellent shape. I wished it well, and hoped it would flourish under the good stewardship of the Board of Trustees.

These are some of the circumstances that led to my resignation:

On 30 March 2011, after a year of huge uncertainty about the Society’s future, we received the good news that our funding bid to the Arts Council had been successful, and we had been awarded a 31% increase in funding.

Two days later, I was called to a meeting by the Poetry Society’s Chair of Trustees, Peter Carpenter. I believed we were going to be discussing the urgent problems facing other organisations in the Poetry Sector. Quite out of the blue, I found there was something else on the agenda.

The Chair told me he’d been waiting until after the funding announcement to tell me about a proposal put to him by Fiona Sampson, the Editor of Poetry Review, a proposal that he’d been discussing with her since January without my knowledge. She requested a new working arrangement whereby she would reduce her days, work mainly from home, and report directly to the Board. I must emphasise that this was put forward as a permanent arrangement. It was initially communicated to me verbally and, a few days later, in writing.

The timing was completely unexpected. Although the relative integration / independence of the Society’s magazine Poetry Review within the Society’s activities had been a regular subject of debate throughout the Editor’s tenure, and long pre-dated my appointment, this had not been a recent subject of discussion.

In September 2008, before my time as Director of the Poetry Society, Fiona Sampson approached the Society’s Board of Trustees with a similar proposal. She requested that her fixed-term contract be made permanent and that the structure of the Society be altered to raise her status and allow her to report directly to the Board rather than continue to be managed by the Director. The Board rejected both suggestions (7 October 2008). The Arts Council was involved in the discussions, and supported the Board’s rejection of the proposal at a subsequent Board meeting I attended on 20 November 2008.

I queried with Peter Carpenter the timing of this revival of Ms Sampson’s proposal in 2011. We had only just submitted a detailed 4-year plan to the Arts Council that had been supported fully by the Board. The plan had reflected a fully-integrated Poetry Society, and this was the vision endorsed by the Arts Council. To make such a significant change now seemed to me both dishonest and dangerous. Our funding offer from the Arts Council remained only conditional.

Carpenter apologised, but explained that poets were putting pressure on him, the Board were going to split over it, and that Ms Sampson had suggested she would otherwise leave.

I raised serious operational concerns about how the proposal would work in practice, explained that many other members of staff would be affected and they would need to be consulted. I explained that the staff had all been working hard in an atmosphere of great uncertainty and did not deserve a major upheaval just when they were expecting to enjoy some well-earned stability. I must emphasise that I did not reject the proposal: however, I gave my opinion that the proposal was potentially destabilising and could jeopardise the Society’s future funding; and that our urgent priority ought to be playing an active role supporting those poetry organisations that had received cuts in funding, rather than looking inwards. I clearly needed more time to consider this. The Chair’s response was unexpected. I was forbidden to discuss the matter further with him, in an email dated 2 April, 11.36.

There followed, in my opinion, the most extraordinarily stubborn and ill-considered sequence of actions by the Board. A confidential Board meeting was called (4 April, 08.34). I petitioned the Chair four times to think carefully before preventing the Arts Council from attending the meeting as stipulated in all previous funding agreements. The Chair replied: (5 April, 08.09) “There is no need for ACE to know of the content of our board discussion… It is confidential to the board and thus only the business of the board.” I pleaded to be given the chance to gather information for the Board in order to help them make an informed decision. (5 April, 09.16). This was refused. I asked to know what would be discussed, and was told that it would be only ‘organisational structure and related issues’ (12 April, 09.31). I was not invited to attend the meeting, and neither were the staff who usually attended Board meetings (Paul Ranford and Rebecka Mustajarvi). However, I would be required to return, unaccompanied, to hear ‘the outcome of our discussion’.

I was unprepared for the nature of this confidential meeting on 13 April. With no independent witnesses present, and with no preamble, I was read out two Board decisions: ‘There will be a formal job evaluation of the Director’s role & responsibilities’ and ‘The Board accept the proposal as set forward by the Review Editor’. I asked to discuss this, and was told that that was inappropriate. There was no written proposal to discuss, no costings, no time-frame, no implementation framework, no staff consultation plan. I prided myself on running a professional organisation and I was responsible for safeguarding the employment rights of staff. I was responsible to funders and members for delivering against agreed objectives. If the Board were not prepared even to allow me input into such significant decision-making, I warned them I would have to consider my position. I further warned them that they were acting in disregard of my rights and interests and I might have to consider resignation.

This meeting was timed immediately before I was due to go on a long-planned trip to Australia, and I took the precautionary measure of sending a formal letter (17 April) requesting that no organisational change be made until proper discussion could take place on my return. The Board waited until my return, but implemented the proposed changes immediately and without discussion (10 May). Peter Carpenter confirmed he would “split off Poetry Review so it reports to me [Peter Carpenter]”. I feared this was the first step towards a much more profound separation of the Review from the Society.

As the Board began to take legal advice, they appear to have realized the depths of the hole they had dug for themselves. They insisted the restructuring proposal was not permanent, but just a 3-month trial (though with no end game declared for determining whether it would continue or not). And they appear to have tried to find things to justify their actions in retrospect. They maintained suddenly that the proposal was being implemented to ease my workload, for example; or that it was as a result of strangers talking at a party regarding an apparent rift. I do not accept that any actions were taken as a result of a desire to ease my workload, and I have been given no evidence of people talking at a party. Indeed, I have received inconsistent accounts of this alleged conversation. My job description was then re-written and casually presented to me. Finally, months after I left, I learned for the first time, from remarks made by the Acting Chair at the EGM, and reported in the press, that apparently Trustees were giving me a ’breathing space’ from contact with another member of staff – even though they had reassured me time and again there had been no complaints about my management.

I have also been told that Peter Carpenter rang the previous Chair, Anne Marie Fyfe, and asked that he be allowed to use an e-mail from her to “get at” me. I had previously telephoned Ms Fyfe to check a couple of facts about things from her time as Chair. Peter Carpenter then threatened me with the possibility of legal action over this supposed “breach of confidentiality”, and stressed there would be action taken if I talked about the Poetry Society to anyone again. This seemed patently absurd. My view is that both of these actions were attempts to discredit and intimidate me after I had raised my concerns over the way the Board were proceeding.

I raised concerns about the divisiveness of giving one member of staff preferential terms and conditions and perhaps making her feel isolated; I raised concerns about the need for proper consultation with staff; I raised concerns about the need to have a structured plan to avoid operational confusion; I raised concerns that there was no business case for the changes imposed; and I raised concerns about spending and funding. I also raised concerns about the way I felt I had been treated personally and what I felt to be unacceptable and unremitting bullying behaviour towards me.

If the Board were implementing organisational changes, I asked why they didn’t recognize the necessity of contacting the HR consultants we had on retainer for employment law advice – who could and should have been consulted, free of charge, and whose indemnity policy that protected the Poetry Society was now no longer valid as their advice had not been sought. An invoice from lawyers Harbottle & Lewis was presented to me, and I had to sign a cheque for expenditure that I had been unaware had been commissioned by the Trustees. I had previously secured the services of a legal firm pro bono for the Society, and was never asked if we had any existing arrangements in place before Harbottles were instructed. I believe Members and funders should have full information as to how funds are being spent, and it is for that reason that I raise this point.

Eventually, there was chaos, with different Trustees in and out the building, contacting different members of staff directly (rather than going through me as was usual practice) with random unplanned instructions. Trustees insisted I drop important planned priorities to attend unplanned meetings about their ‘organisational changes’. On one occasion the insistence that I attend a meeting at 24 hours’ notice prevented me from preparing for a presentation on which a £100,000 funded project depended. When I requested the proposed meeting be rescheduled to enable me to carry out my job effectively, my request was refused. I asked again if I could give my view on the place of Poetry Review within the structure of the Society, and was told (9 May) “please would you explain why you assume that the status of a meeting that members of the board choose to have with the Editor depends upon ‘the contents of our discussion’.

I wrote Trustees a letter (11 May) outlining my grave concerns about the consequences of the Trustees’ recent diversion from our agreed priorities for the current year. Included amongst my concerns was this: “It is a condition of Arts Council funding that the organisation tell the Arts Council if it wants to make significant changes to the agreed programme…We urgently need to discuss the further impact of recent events upon our Arts Council funding. I am concerned that the funding was awarded to us on the basis of a certain set of circumstances, which have now been fundamentally changed without any discussion with me let alone the Arts Council.” I reassured Trustees that we had an excellent relationship with the Arts Council, and in my professional judgement ACE would be supportive as long as we talked things through openly and honestly with them.

I found the behaviour of certain Trustees increasingly intimidating and on 17 May I received a direct instruction to conceal information regarding issues within the Poetry Society from the Arts Council at a forthcoming meeting. Despite the fact that our funding agreement insists “The success of the relationship relies on effective communication and the sharing of information”, I was told I must convince the Arts Council it was ‘good news, good news, good news’. I was told that if I let the Arts Council know I had any concerns about governance, I would face immediate disciplinary action. I had grave concerns about governance, and would not lie about this, and so on 19 May, I resigned. I felt I had no option but to take this step.

Peter Carpenter accepted my resignation, and on 20 May, he and Trustee (now Acting-Chair) Laura Bamford, arrived unannounced at the Society’s offices to cut off my email and tell staff they were not to let me back in the building. I was not in the office, since I had booked a day off. They didn’t think to tell me personally my employment had been immediately terminated and I would not be required to serve the notice that I had given them. I was on a train to Liverpool when a letter was couriered to my home address, which I therefore did not receive until two days later. Certain members of staff were apparently invited to read through my emails while I still remained uninformed that I was no longer working for the Society. There was to be no handover – no cancellation of meetings, no changing of bank signatories, no guidance notes left or to-do lists talked through.

This is only a brief summary of the events that led me to resign. It was not (as has been suggested) because of my working relationship with a member of my team or due to my workload.

To deflect attention from their own evident bad practice, it seems the Board have tried to throw people off the stench with false allegations about myself and Fiona Sampson, and the prospect of legal action.

I have not taken legal action. I have repeatedly reassured Trustees that I have no wish to take legal action. The Poetry Society’s Board of Trustees, however, has already spent £24,000 on legal advice – on a range of matters – in the few months since they first adopted a new management style and decided to step beyond the bounds of their usual remit. Last year, there was zero expenditure on legal advice. In addition to the £24,000 already spent this year, at least £3000 has been spent on unplanned additional PR, supposedly to mitigate reputational risk. To give you an idea what these sums mean to an organization like the Poetry Society, some of its staff earn around £17,500 a year. Imagine how those staff must feel, watching this wanton expenditure. Imagine how painful it is for us to contemplate the toil and the toll of raising the money that the Trustees have so recklessly thrown away.

Members must now ask whether these Trustees were acting in good faith and in the best interests of the Poetry Society. Given the current state of the Poetry Society’s Arts Council funding (suspended until further notice), the Board’s ‘no-one need know’ approach does not appear to have served the Society well. Out of concern for my colleagues I have been wary of making the Board’s actions public. It seems quite clear, however, that funding cannot flow again, until the truth is out and a new Board is up.

Judith Palmer

______________________________________

All of the above can be supported by letters, texts, emails, and witness statements.

Those Trustees on the Poetry Society Board throughout 2011 were Laura Bamford, Alan Jenkins, Emma Bravo, Jacob Sam-La Rose, John Simmons, Duke Dobing, Wendy Jones, John Richmond, Barry Kernon, Jacqui Rowe and Anne Jenkins.

Robyn Bolam and Peter Carpenter have since resigned.

CLICK HERE TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THE PETITION

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM Reflections

2011-07-23T15:37:00.000+01:00

Following yesterday's historic and fraught meeting of the Poetry Society's Board of Trustees and some of its members, many fine people have felt compelled to write on the topic. I shall attempt here, to compile all the relevant responses so that the various opinions can be easily sourced.

Jane Holland - A New Dawn for the Poetry Society
George Szirtes - The Poetry Society: What Have We Learned
Christine Michael - Dysfunction, disharmony, dissarray
Jon Stone - But Can't We All Just Get Along
Richard Fair - The Poetry Society EGM
Kate Fox - Why being bored on a Board is a Good Thing
Stephen Bates - Guardian Article
Charlie Ashley-Roberts - #posocegm (poem)
Polly Clark - Poetry Society EGM
Michelene Wandor - Prêt à poetry in the Surgeons’ Hall
Katy Evans-Bush - #PoSocEGM: The Post-Mortem
Fiona Moore - Counting: Poets, Butterflies
Rob Sharp - Article for The Independent (with open 'Comments' section)
Niki May Young - Article for Civil Society Finance

Please do let me know if I've missed any out or if new ones pop up that you want added into the list.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM Commentary

2011-07-22T21:09:00.000+01:00

“trustee n. (plural trustees)

A person to whom property is legally committed in trust, to be applied either for the benefit of specified individuals, or for public uses; one who is intrusted with property for the benefit of another; also, a person in whose hands the effects of another are attached in a trustee process.”

-Wiktionary

I write this having, just this minute, got home from the Poetry Society EGM which ran today from 14:00 until about 17:10. I write this post in the hope of giving as much undiluted/opinionated fact from the meeting whilst summarising points that will take some time to arrive from the full minutes.

I stress the fact that I make this post hastily from notes taken in longhand from a very long and wordy public discussion. If you feel that I have made important omissions or misrepresentations then there are instructions at the end.

As in my previous post, I wish to present these facts in a logical order, rather than a chronological order, under suitable subheadings.

Why the lack of Twitter coverage?

The meeting was held in a lecture theatre with practically no WiFi or 3G coverage. The only person who was able to give regular updates was Jacob Sam-La Rose, a member of the Board. Interestingly, he did this using the #posocegm tag advertised on Silkworms Ink yesterday.

I suggested halfway through the meeting that it was not appropriate for a member of the board to be using the official Poetry Society Twitter-Feed, let alone be the only source of live information to the outside world.

Resignation of the Board and Vote of No Confidence

The first thing announced by the Board is that they would all resign, effective of September. The reason for this deadline being that this is how long they felt it would take to ensure a smooth transition to a new board.

By the end of the EGM however, the Board’s resignation was not enough to satisfy the members present and there was a Vote of No Confidence in which 302 voted for, 69 voted against and 11 abstained.

Discussions very soon moved onto calls from a few (not all) members from the floor who wanted an immediate resignation from some/all members of the Board. It was pointed out that there need to be at least 5 board members at any one given time. Kate Clanchy asked members of the Board to publicly stand down at the meeting – she did not have the full support of the room, despite saying “I speak for everyone here...” several times.

The Root of the Issue (via John Simmons)

The meeting began with an overview of the issue from John Simmons. Here is the narrative that I garnered from it…

It was made absolutely clear that the entire issue stemmed from the breakdown in the working relationship between Poetry Society Director, Judith Palmer, and Poetry Review Editor, Fiona Sampson.

Judith Palmer was single-handedly behind the Arts Council proposal this year which was met with an acceptance and the promise of a substantial increase in funding.

The increased workload of such a successful grant created increased stress for Judith Palmer and it was the view of the Board that she should take an extended vacation whilst some of her workload was delegated.

Around this time ‘people’ were publicly commenting on the personality clash between Palmer and Sampson and the Board felt the need to address this. The Board decided that, for a fixed 3 month period, Sampson would report to them directly rather than go through Palmer due to their untenable working relationship.

John Simmons suggested that there was not time to discuss this properly and so they went ahead with this arrangement without Palmer’s knowledge or consent. Palmer soon resigned with immediate effect.

For perceived legal reasons, the Board and the Society were silent about this. Simmons stated that “our silence fuelled the flames of conspiracy”.

The situation, as it now stands, is that there is no guarantee of the Arts Council Funding ever finding its way to the Poetry Society and all relationships between all the Society’s stakeholders are marred. More damaging still, the Society’s recent expenditures on legal advice make a significant financial strain on them.

Key elements of this narrative were picked apart and scrutinised over the course of the meeting, as I hope to discuss later on in this post.

The Hitler Video

The Board mentioned that, of all the criticism and conspiracy theory that they faced during the past months’ events, the most hurtful was the ‘Downfall’ parody video which likened several Society members to Nazis.

Paul Ranford – Finance Manager

First participant in the Q&A session was Paul Ranford, the Society’s resigned finance manager and teacher of Business Studies. His argument in full can be read here. I shall provide some of the key points of what he (very eloquently) said…

Ranford began by saying that ‘today is a time for sensible words… sensible words.’ He is incredibly concerned that the Society’s Arts Council relationship has been upset and that the Society’s reputation has gone from its absolute height to its absolute lowest.

The financial reserves built up by the Society over 100 years are at roughly £120,000 – if recent legal fees were to continue then this would be very easily depleted. Ranford made mention that talks had been had about valuing the Society’s current Betterton Street property in light of potential funding cuts.

Ranford finished by stating that the Board absolutely failed to support their director when she needed it most and that the ‘sensible words’ he had heard today were not enough.

Large applause soon followed.

Katy Evans-Bush – Where was the HR procedure?

Katy, who has extensive experience of working in the public sector, coupled with extensive experience of conflict resolution, intimated that she was shocked at the apparent lack of procedure involved here.

How is it that the Poetry Review Editor was able to unofficially voice a grievance directly to the Board, circumnavigating the Director and have the issue dealt with that way? Is there a clearly laid out procedure for HR conflicts in the Poetry Society and were they followed? Was a formal grievance ever even officially filed?

The answer?

There was no formal grievance ever filed and the Board admits that the measures taken were drastic. It was felt by the Board that the two employees needed ‘breathing space’ from each other.

Evans-Bush pointed out that Palmer was never consulted over this ‘breathing space’ and therefore enforced breathing space is tantamount to exile and banishment.

At this point, Niall O’Sullivan turned to me and mouthed the word ‘bull’s-eye’.

Tom Bell, Union Official – What about acas?

Why were none of the professional organisations such as acas not consulted so that trained professionals could guide the resolution in a fair-handed way? Bell made it clear he felt that a Board who intervenes without use of official grievance procedure should resign.

Barbara Cumbers – FS’ contract and JP’s resignation

Barbara asked to know where the grievance between JP and FS stemmed from, and she inquired as to whether it was linked in with comments made about FS receiving increased pay and reduced hours. Paul Ranford produced the minutes which corroborated that Sampson’s working week would be reduced from 4 days to 3, and that he was asked not to reduce her pay.

The response to this was that the arrangement was only temporary (this phrase was used a lot today).

Cumbers’ secondary question was why was it deemed inappropriate for the Director of the Poetry Society to work through her notice period?

The response to this was that “there were a number of occasions where process and procedure weren’t being adhered to [by Judith Palmer]”.

Legal Advice

The Board of Trustees have been seeking, at great expense, professional legal advice having supposedly received several threats of lawsuits from Judith Palmer. Here are a few discussions that arose from this issue:

Question from the floor: Why were you going to the same lawyers used by Rupert Murdoch when there are several law firms set up who are specifically geared towards advising small charity operations such as the Poetry Society?

Answer from the Board: We didn’t know that such companies existed.

Question from the floor: Did you ever receive written legal threats from Judith Palmer with regards to this issue?

Answer from the Board: No. Only verbal threats.

Question from the floor: If you were dealing with a stressed employee, whom you were attempting to support through times of great difficulty, why did you treat a verbal threat as anything other than a ‘heat-of-the-moment’ thing and go down the path of paying for expensive legal advice?

Answer from the Board: The threats were more than a single incident – several people were threatened with legal procedure by JP on a variety of occasions. It is in the interest of any company to seek advice when threatened with legal action.

Pre-Interval – A call for a vote

Philip Polecoff (thank you to Tammy for spelling) suggested that the Board could be nothing but completely ‘lame’ until September and it could only be be damaging to have a stagnant Board resolved to do nothing until then.

(Cut for commercial break)

The Interval

The conversations taking place during the interval were frantic, emotional, passionate and, to an extent, factional. Some felt that they wanted the Board gone immediately following a Vote of No Confidence. Others felt that such a knee-jerk response in an emotional state would be more to do with vengeance than what is good for the society.

The Build-up and The Vote

Laurie Smith announced the motion that, in light of today’s meeting, the members of the Poetry Society present today wish to make a vote of no confidence against the Board of the Society.

Alan Brownjohn stated that he cannot endorse such a vote as it was in no way mentioned on the meeting’s agenda and that it would be nothing but damaging to all concerned. There was an amount of support for this opinion by those who felt that nothing should be finalised in the heat of such an emotive meeting.

Amidst all this was an obscene amount of umming/ahhing about the propriety of a show of hands, a ballot, a poll or any other form of proportional representation. Much grumbling ensued and the vote was finally passed. The results, as you know, 302 voted for, 69 voted against and 11 abstained.

Interim Board Members

4 candidates were put forward to be co-opted as Board Members in the interim between now and the September AGM. Amongst them was Michael Schmidt – questions were asked over the propriety of a PN Review employee being a Poetry Society Trustee but the Board seemed not to see this as a large enough conflict of interest to put him out of the running.

Andrew Motion

No massive story here – I just had a short chat with him after the meeting about his experiences of Jamie’s Dream School. Really Nice Bloke in person.

Everything Else

So, I’ve surely missed a lot of very important details out of this report. I’m sure that, in my furious note-taking I may have misrepresented certain issues. If you feel that this is the case, then please do write to me (poetry@silkwormsink.com) or tell me over twitter or in the comments section of this post, and I will happily happily happily add edits and appendices to the end of this piece of writing.

Appendix 1: The Trustees

The Board of Trustees at this meeting were Laura Bamford (chair), Emma Bravo, Duke Dobing, Alan Jenkins, Anne Jenkins, Wendy Jones, Barry Kernon, John Richmond, Jacqui Rowe, Jacob Sam-La Rose, John Simmons.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM Live Feed

2011-07-21T16:59:00.000+01:00

CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW

We will be live-feeding tomorrow's historic EGM on Twitter for anyone unable to attend. Please see yesterday's post for additional information.

Silkworms Ink

Poetry Society EGM Special

2011-07-20T20:15:00.000+01:00

Follow Friday's Poetry Society EGM live on Twitter

It is a month when the literary world dances to a tune synchronised with the downfall of tabloid journalism. Silkworms Ink is not here to add to the argument, but we do think that it is important to help others keep track of it.

Friday 22^nd July 2011 will be an historic day in British Poetry. At 2PM at the Royal College of Surgeons there will be a Poetry Society EGM (Extraordinary General Meeting).

For those of you with no knowledge of the build-up to this event, I have provided wider reading at the end of this post. I shall summarise the issues as I see them as succinctly as possible here:

The Poetry Society has recently been granted a large increase in funding from the government, and there is disagreement as to how this money should be deployed.
Several high-ranking members of the Poetry Society and its Board of Directors have recently resigned and there has been no lucid explanation as to the reasons for this.
Some people have publicly expressed a concern that the Editor of the Poetry Review is moving towards a level of autonomy from the Poetry Society that is unconstitutional.
Dispute exists between whether the Poetry Society’s primary goal should be in broadening the audience of poetry or promoting poetry’s most achieved practitioners.

My engagement with these issues is, at present, purely as a bystander so please do contact me if you feel that I have misrepresented the issue.

My only stake in this is that I love poetry, Poetry Review and The Poetry Society. As a paid-up member of the Society and as a taxpayer, I am paying for these things to exist and have every faith that they will endure and continue to do a very important and admirable job.

"The puzzle of worldly success (not wholly an oxymoron for poets) and how if affects the actual writing of poetry (and indeed what gets published and read), is something we often disavow. Yet it's always with us, and demands that we make peace with it - even if that turns out to be, as Michael Symmons Roberts has it, Bonhoeffer's "costly grace"." - Fiona Sampson

My attendance at Friday’s EGM will not be as a subscriber to a particular side of a false dichotomy, but simply as someone who cares about what is happening. Anyone who has an interest in literature, business ethics or the allocation of public funding should care about what happens at this meeting.

But the Poetry Society’s membership is vast and not everyone is at liberty to attend this meeting – I am fortunate enough to have an employer who values this issue and is willing to let me leave work early to attend. For this reason, I shall be reporting the events of the meeting in real-time on our TwitterFeed and will post a summary the following day on our blog.

For those of you who have not exhausted the public-domain literature on the situation, here is a brief reading list that should give you a sound introduction. It is not in chronological order, but rather logical order (i.e. the narrative that most lends itself to you understanding any insider-speak and obscure references):

Background Reading:

Item 1 An introduction to the dispute from The Guardian

Item 2 Announcement of General Meeting

Item 3 Brief Overview of Petition

Item 4 Agenda for the Meeting

Item 5 A response to the situation from Katy Evans-Bush

Item 6 A response to the situation from Todd Swift

Item 7 A Letter from Ex-Poetry Society Director Judith Palmer to Todd Swift

Item 8 A response to the situation from Lemn Sissay

Item 9 A message from Fiona Sampson

Item 10 Article in the Telegraph

Item 11 A collection of correspondence between Kate Clanchy and ‘The Board’

Phil Brown

Poetry Society Member

Out With The Old | Mini Essay | Why The Only Way Is Essex proves that Baudrillard was right all along, by Caitlin Allen

2011-07-06T19:02:00.000+01:00

Jean Baudrillard’s big idea was the simulacrum, ‘the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.' Simply, he believed that there was no such thing as first-hand reality any more. Instead all we have are copies of copies of copies, perfect replicas without an original. Nothing has an innate essence anymore, everything is purely surface. He conceived of institutions such as Disneyland as methods of re-imposing the reality principle. That is to say, Americans created the fantasy world of Disneyland so that they could convince themselves through comparison that the rest of America has a real existence, when in truth it is equally as fabricated. What I would like to propose is that the pretence of presenting us with snapshots from real lives of real people created by the producers of The Only Way Is Essex proves it is no longer possible to separate out a single original reality from the proliferation of fictions. ‘Essex’ is only as real as ‘America’ which is about as real as Disneyland.

In the opening sequence to The Only Way Is Essex, the viewer is informed that ‘the people are all real although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment.' Most of this ‘setting up’ consists of the producers ensuring that certain people are in certain places at certain times, for example arranging for one character’s ex to be having a drink in a bar when that character arrives on a first date with someone else. In these scenarios the situation has been arranged but the reactions of the people involved are real. Other set ups involve having one character ‘acting’, i.e. saying what they’ve been told to by producers (usually passing on gossip), while another reacts sincerely. One has to ask what the difference is between the sequences where ‘what they do’ unfolds naturally and where ‘what they do’ is set up. Whether they are acting of their own volition or whether they are simply doing what they're told, these people really are doing these things and must live with the consequences, so the boundaries between acting and living become blurred. When dealing with the fall out from these set-ups the personalities truly believe they are living these fabrications, so where is the difference? The personalities’ ‘realities’ and their moments in character are impossible to disentangle.

Furthermore, the emotional reactions that the cast of The Only Way Is Essex have are extreme but fleeting, seemingly sincere but very much transient. Being dumped by someone they’ve been dating for three weeks seems like the end of the world, but they manage to find someone new before 48 hours have elapsed. It’s almost as if the ‘cast’ are portraying these emotions because they believe they should be, must be; because they are copying their behaviour from pop culture such as cinema, where love at first sight really does happen and where ‘the one’ exists. These people replicate behaviour from films and television programmes which are themselves fictions, so that The Only Way Is Essex becomes one more link in a series of copies with no origin in reality.

A friend pointed out just how lacking in real sexuality the programme is, which is somewhat surprising considering that lots of the action revolves around the characters’ efforts to make themselves more ‘physically desirable’, and around their relationships with the opposite sex. The perfecting of their appearance becomes an end in itself and the relationships often appear to be more rooted in alliance rather than attraction. One of the characters, Sam Faiers, was already a relatively well-known glamour model before the series began, and several of the others have aspirations that way (and the fake breasts to match). This, however, seems not to be a result of a strong sense of their own sexuality; it is merely a status symbol that they want to grab a part of.

To call these girls stupid would be unfair. No, they aren’t particularly well educated and their grasp on the English language is sometimes rather loose, but they’re well aware of the deal they’re making here. They know that participating in this circus will bring them several steps closer to where they want to be. The fact that this status of celebrity-for-being-a-celebrity is one many of us are morally opposed to is irrelevant: for Amy Childs and co it was a calculated move.

I suppose what I am saying is that we shouldn’t criticise these individuals for ‘bad acting’ or for handing part of their agency over in return for a certain status, because it is something we all do necessarily, just less honestly and overtly. The rest of us still place faith in our ability to separate reality from fiction, whereas the ‘stars’ of The Only Way Is Essex have surrendered to hyperreality. The confusion of reality and fiction, essence and appearance, depth and surface, is what makes programmes such as The Only Way Is Essex and Made In Chelsea such fascinating viewing, and the most compelling evidence of postmodernism available to us today.

By Caitlin Allen

See also: Things That 'Arg' From The Only Way Is Essex's Face Looks Like

Out With The Old | Chapbook | Vol LIII, Things I Never Want You To Find Out, by Brittany Fonte

2011-07-04T16:59:00.000+01:00

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol LIII, Things I Never Want You To Find Out

by Brittany Fonte

Brittany Fonte holds an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Fiction. She teaches Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing, as well as Composition, at the university level. Her fiction and prose poems can be found in journals such as Literary Mama, The Wrong Tree Review, 42nd Opus, and Pemmican Journal. She is an assistant poetry editor with Low Brow Press.

Out With The Old | Theatre | The Olympics are only The Beginning

2011-06-27T11:35:00.000+01:00

(Just don't expect to experience it at the new RSC theatre)

New is an odd concept. The more I think about it, from a book to a pair of trousers to an idea, new is simply about ownership. I have this for the first time, therefore it is new, to me. When you move into theatre, the concept of new becomes slightly perverse. How exactly do you do a new version of Henry V, or Hobson’s Choice or The Seagull. The coveted descriptions; ‘world premier’, ‘new writing’, ‘recently discovered’ sell tickets and put bums on seats. We live in an era of fast over-consumerism and so the USP that we need in all our dealings is this one of ‘newness’, of ‘first-time-ness’, ergo, of ‘I am privileged’. The problem is, of course, that not a thing in theatre is ever truly ‘new’. Stories, words, paint-frames get used time and time again, albeit they might look different, but there are only so many versions of the same tale said in different ways with another shade of paint on the set. The way theatre and performance counteracts this stalemate is the key to its success, and that is its ‘live-ness’, its ‘happening-now-ness’. It may not be ‘new’ but it is ephemeral and that’s worth a bag of gold.

At a recent professional market-place for street arts (this is, as it sounds, when companies pitch their shows to potential bookers, backers and festivals) at the Greenwich and Docklands Festival, Chenine Bhathena (London 2012 Creative Programmer) delivered her speech outlining the ‘new’ ideas for cultural programming that 2012 was recognising and supporting. Among these were: multiculturalism, large-scale outdoor performance, and circus arts. For the people in the room, who have been making this kind of performance for years, it didn’t sound very new. But I suppose what Bhathena was talking about was a movement away from The Theatre, The Building, and back into the streets; creating a culture of pop-up performance, far away from (and one might say an advance on) the old bastions of theatre. You only have to stand on London’s South Bank where, in one direction you see the (reconstructed) Elizabethan Globe Playhouse, and the 1970’s monolith that is the National Theatre in the other direction, or stand at the doors of the Old Vic and look across the road to the Young Vic to realise this is a tried and tested method. When it comes to crunch time (be that a recession or an Olympic year, or both) then forget the baby, chuck it out with the bathwater. Hell, chuck the bath out while you’re at it.

But new buildings don’t mean new ways of thinking about art as proven by the dismal ‘new’ RSC theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, unveiled earlier this year. What the RSC had the opportunity to do was create an exciting, versatile performance space. Instead they’ve created a Front of House that misdirects you like every good shopping centre should, and they’ve built a playing space that recreates precisely The Swan, and the Other Place. It’s a great space, it’s just an unnecessary one. And it seems too that the golden boy of theatre, Rupert Goold has become stuck his ways, with his new production of Merchant of Venice speaking to every misogynistic, sexist, crass trope of performances at the RSC in the mid 90’s. Here then is the new kid on the block who needs to be ousted, for an even newer model.

So what would be new? Performance has been underground, it’s been underwater, it’s been all-night, it’s been still and static and immersive and terrifying. We don’t really want to get rid of the old, the stuff that works, the stuff that keeps performance ‘live’. But what we do need to do is create a new system of valuing performance, of paying for it, and of recognising it in terms of cultural significance. There’s no money to be made (or to be found) right now in the business of performance, but if we can lay-down some solid groundwork for culture, then this ‘new-ness’ might be a proper revolution.

At the end of her speech Bhathena, who is hugely positive about the possibilities for 2012 (but, like all the politicians of the Olympics, fails ever to mention 2013), was able to introduce the Artistic Directors for the Para-Olympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Jenny Sealey, the Artistic Director of GRAEAE (Britain’s most celebrated disabled theatre company), herself profoundly deaf, will take on the closing ceremony and direct the celebrations. Ten years ago this news would barely have elicited a reaction. Last week in a hall in Greenwich this announcement was met with a standing ovation, and a feeling that here was an opportunity to make something “new”, to put Great Britain on the cultural and sporting map for being the first Olympics to truly support, promote, engage with and recognise the achievements and talents of artists and sportspersons in the disabled community. For some it is too little too late, or feels like political spin and box-ticking. But I was in that room, and a revolution happened in the space of a minute. This is not about ‘new-ness’ so much as ‘live-ness’, and about taking the lessons of the past and putting them into practice. By being inclusive as opposed to exclusive, we have created a culture of performance that is constantly changing and reshaping, challenging and regenerating. As far as I’m concerned the mesmerising Danny Boyle (and it will be mesmerising) Opening Ceremony of the Olympics can take a hike, it’s old hat, it’s glorified fireworks – I’m looking to the future of performance and culture and identity- a future that will challenge as much as entertain, and it starts in September, at a very significant closing ceremony to mark the beginning of the next chapter. I’ll see you there.

Rowan Rutter
Theatre Editor

Out With The Old | Music | End of the World Blues, or, “We’re some kind of incredible multiplication more successful than the average person”

2011-06-24T00:40:00.000+01:00

So dose me up once is not enough

I can still see the ground
And from this high rise view looking down on you
I'm not the one wasting my time
This is the end of the world news
This is the end of the world news sponsored by God

So sung Tom McRae on a track from his self-titled debut, and the 14 year old me loved the shit out of it. Here was an artist and a song that combined all the things I wanted to do with my own guitar as a pubescent bairn: a simple, but not pathetically simple minor key guitar structure; a set of lyrics almost entirely constructed out of one-line, self-contained abstractions; a voice flecked with sexy, Counting Crows-ish (remember them? HOHOHO) mannerisms that were just English-sounding enough to slip into one’s own choir-trained vocal approach. And so forth. I dug this song so much I remember picking up an acoustic guitar at, potentially, my first ever house party, again aged 14ish, and playing it to a bunch of girls having introduced it as “a song I’ve been working on for ages.” Yeah, I was a little fuck back then.

Needless to say, a couple years later, I had moved on from poor Tom, and could regularly be found sitting at Sandwich Club (those of us who brought packed lunches to school formed a sandwich club. At Christmas, we organised a Secret Sandwich, as opposed to Santa) mouthing off about McRae’s rubbish one-man impersonation of late REM – the worst REM of all the REMs. “Take ‘End of the World News,’ from his self-titled debut,” I’d begin. “The sixth line: ‘to define you the king of the game.’ I’d actually prefer ‘ahead of the game’ to that kind of half-baked, nonsensical attempt to drag a cliché into the realms of originality, like some kind of very, very, very poor man’s Jens Lekman.” Yeah, I was a little fuck back then.

Needless to say, a couple years further on and I’d forgotten McRae had ever existed, his mewing silenced by the bells and whistles of fresher-friendly popgroups like Crystal Castles and Datarock. A state of affairs that remained in place until just over a month ago, when I was sat in my room watching the Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard talking-head bricolages which accompany last month’s set of Bad Seeds re-releases – the Boatman’s Call film specifically. A thoroughly nice-looking man appeared, wearing a jacket and stubble every bit as pathetic as my own (watch this, from 7.45 onwards). Avoiding making eye contact with the camera, he over-emphasised certain nouns in order to draw attention away from his manifest gaucheness – something I’m fully aware I do in artificial situations. “I am the child of two vicars,” he began. “And for me to have somebody who talks about religion in a funny, clever, challenging way – that was a way for me to antagonise my family as well.”

My God, it’s basically me – I mean, I’m a vicar’s son, as opposed to two vicars’ son, but even so. I thought. Along with: I can’t wait to find out who this nice-looking man is, we should probably hang out or something. (The way these Bad Seeds films work is, they don’t caption the interviewees until the very end, so either you don’t know who you’re seeing talk, and therefore judge what they’re saying objectively, or have the opportunity to congratulate yourself on recognising, I don’t know, the bassist from the Veils, a goddam angel who appears on several of these films.)

Readers, it was Tom McRae! I had/have become what I thought I despised. Or rather, I had/have finally recognised what I’d convinced myself I despised for what it was, namely something not unlike myself. (I hope you don’t think this is about me drawing parallels between myself and a chiselled, mega-selling troubadour, it’s honestly not, try to bear with me.)

What a cliché. But here’s my point which is, I’m pleased to admit, very much a case of dragging a cliché into the realms of originality: admitting to myself that I’m probably more like Tom McRae than I’m not like Tom McRae helped me to come to an important conclusion: growing up culturally, musically, literally, coming to the end of one’s immaturity, isn’t about turning into one’s father/mother, like the lazy stories say: it’s about turning into one’s father’s/mother’s son/daughter. (Which, for the sake of readability, I will henceforth refer to as: becoming one’s father’s son. Because I’m a boy, silly.) Growing up is about acknowledging that the musician you’ve contrived antipathy towards because of his unashamed emotive directness is probably the kind of musician you’d have become if you were any good at music-making, and more handsome. Growing up is about recognising that the things you properly value have much more to do with the things that your parents value than you’ve hitherto been willing to admit.

It’s not linear. My father is a vicar, but I’m not especially keen on hymns (except for bona fide pumpers like this). When I really interrogate, say, my love affair with Nick Cave though, documented extensively on these pages, I realise that it’s the way he integrates a profound respect for liturgical poetry, along with an underlying willingness to be touched by a spiritual sublime, into a model of songwriting that is also violent and decadent and culturally enriching and gorgeous and chaotic and dense and sexy – I realise it’s the presence of what my dad does within that, which makes it so important to me. Nick Cave legitimises my somewhat all-over-the-place views on religion to the point that I’ve made peace with the significance of what my dad does in making sense what I do (on the face of things, utterly different. But actually not that different at all, really. I just use fuckwords more).

Anyway, this is all getting a bit heavy, and self-indulgent, so to close in the traditional Silkworms manner, HERE’S A SILLY LIST TO PROVE MY POINT. Vicar’s offspring ancient and modern who turned into their father’s sons as they reached artistic maturity. But first, a quote from (another’s vicar’s son – whose latest record is a classic vicar’s son’s album, all about friends of his father’s who have died and so forth) Mick Harvey, the original and greatest of all the Bad Seeds, on this very subject – taken from an interview I conducted with him on (of all days) Easter Saturday:

We do tend to excel apparently. They do say that, I’ve read an analysis of it, the sons and daughters of Anglican ministers. And it’s quite extraordinary, what they go on to – I can’t remember what the figures are but we’re some kind of incredible multiplication more successful than the average person. I don’t know why.

EXAMPLE THE FIRST, Hobbes

Son of: The Reverend Thomas Hobbes, vicar of Charlton and Westport

Early life: Many, many accusations of atheism.

Maturity: “Atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible.”

EXAMPLE THE SECOND, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Son of: The Reverend John Coleridge

Early life: The Lyrical Ballads, washed down with a fuckton of laudanum

Maturity: ‘On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

EXAMPLE THE THIRD, Tim Westwood

Son of: Bill Westwood, Bishop of Peterborough

Early life: “You can’t come to the kingdom and not see the prince.” S. Dogg

Maturity: “Honestly, baby, I get love out there, pure and simple.” T. Westwood

EXAMPLE THE FOURTH, Kings of Leon

Sons of: Ivan Leon Followhill, a United Pentecostal Preacher

Early life: “You’ll plead, you’ll get down on your knees / For just another taste.”

Maturity: Good one.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Out With The Old | Fiction | Slender Man And Spanking Keira Knightley

2011-06-22T14:46:00.000+01:00

Aaaaah!

Well, it’s out with the old. More specifically, out with David Cronenberg’s upcoming adaptation of A Most Dangerous Method: The Story Of Jung, Freud, & Sabrina Spielrein. I enjoyed Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which had fun with a frosty, unglamorous London and that fight scene, but I thought it was the closest he’d ever come to embracing genre, rather than flirting with it. And, sure, it might just be the canny marketers at work, but the trailer for A Dangerous Method looks very much like an-over familiar period piece. A sort of King’s Speech of psychiatry, in which Jung is inspired towards his theory of individuation by spanking Keira Knightley sexily. Meanwhile, Freud and a curiously French Otto Gross stare reflectively into the air and utter profundities.

What is it with Keira Knightley as the go-to girl for this sort of film? Why did I accept her lanky presence and top-billing with nothing more than a sorrowful groan? Wouldn’t Ruth Wilson be sexier, more twisted, and more believable as a cutting-edge female psycho-analyst? (Actually, I think Michael Fassbender as Jung is a miscast, too – Iain Glen, who played him in an earlier adaptation of the story, seems to me a much better fit, with his current performance in TV’s Game of Thrones proving that he can lend weight and compassion to anything, up to and including the sight of a naked, sooty girl in a blonde wig, clutching a CGI baby dragon to her vagina and Peter Dinklage attempting a really awful English accent).

…and in with the new. Because I was delighted recently to learn of the existence of Slender Man, a faceless, rather skinny chap in a suit who’s apparently been caught on camera in various children’s playgrounds and forests, looking quite exceptionally sinister.

Slender Man is a photoshopped horror creation, made in 2009 by a chap called ‘Victor Surge’ on the comedy website and forum Something Awful as part of a competition to create spooky images. His iconic (not to say dashing) look apparently made him very popular, and he was at once edited into a variety of different pictures, along with an ever-growing backstory, which ranged from the childish – he kills his victims and leaves them in pieces in plastic bags – to the smart – the more you investigate his existence, the more likely he is to appear. And then people began to write.

There are now a considerable number of stories involving the Slender Man, of varying quality, using a very inventive format; the blog itself. Their earliest entries tend to be about something else entirely – deliberately banal hobbies or the usual bloggish self-centred ramblings. Then the narrator will begin to notice a strange, thin-looking man loitering around wherever they go, or (more interesting) stumble upon existing accounts of the Slender Man…such as the other stories, in real life, doing exactly the same thing. An inevitable descent into madness and paranoia will ensue; at the same time, narrators from the other blogs will come across and comment, delivering warnings or prophecies. The narrator may then vanish from the blog entirely, only for another narrator to appear, a friend or colleague who will begin to investigate the disappearance of the last narrator, and so on, and so on…

And, of course, as the stories have gone on, they’ve spread further and further. There are now several Youtube series featuring Slender Man, mockumentaries with a cod-Blair Witch feel. These, too, seem to unfailingly work using layers of myth and multiple sources; in one of the most popular, Marble Hornets, the protagonist is a film-maker who’s examining the pretentious student film of an old (yes, disappeared) friend, and begins to film his own actions, as well as documenting his progress via a blog, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

It’s a little like one of those viral marketing campaigns – except that it’s its own entity, without any cynical advertising clinch, and it’s tightly entrenched enough in the unreality of the internet that it can be disguised as a ‘secret’ truth. After reading the stories, I actually realised I’d seen a picture of Slender Man on a (very self-serious) conspiracy theory website months earlier, which makes the joke even funnier. But it’s also very Borgesian; an indirect influence, I think, probably via Mark Danielewski’s horror novel House of Leaves. Multiple authors, writing in real-time, keeping up the conceit over multiple forms of media, referencing and commenting on each other, even letting their protagonists interact, and readers who don’t just read one story, but are directed to click through onto an earlier ‘original’ story, and an earlier one, and an earlier one…it strikes me that this may be a narrative form that’s actually been born out of the Internet, and that can survive in it.

Out With the Old | Poetry | Eric Gregory Awards 2011

2011-06-21T20:31:00.000+01:00

“that’s one fucker of a fucker, eh?”

“Aye, man, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

-Niall Campbell

Last week was an important time in the world of poetry, for we saw the announcement of this year’s Eric Gregory Award winners who were, if you do not already know, Holly Hopkins, Niall Campbell, Tom Chivers, Martin Jackson and Kim Moore.

I had the pleasure of attending the traditional winners’ reading, hosted in the Betsey Trotwood by Roddy Lumsden.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I go to a lot of poetry events of all shapes and sizes, and as a result I feel that I have developed a fairly keen ear for what works and what does not.

I say this as if it is a hard skill to master; it isn’t. If you can let a week pass after seeing a poet for the first time and still remember something impressive about their reading, then what they are doing works. It really is as simple as that for me. Last Wednesday’s reading was that rare thing of a live event where everyone’s set lodged itself in my perforated memory fairly vividly.

I have known Tom Chivers and Holly Hopkins for long enough not to have been surprised by how well they read (Tom’s crowning moment was probably his masterful inclusion of the calculator-friendly word, ‘boobless’ in a poem and Holly infuriatingly read one of the most beautiful nuptial poems I have ever heard at a point in my life when I am desperately trying to write something for a friend’s wedding).

The other three were a pleasant revelation however. Kim Moore’s mixture of youthful energy and dry sense of humour made for an entertaining end to the opening section. In listening to her describe the interior of a Wetherspoons pub whilst evoking Dante’s Inferno, I felt a slight kindred spirit with the many hours I have spent poetically dissecting life in a public house.

She finished with a hilarious piece about what happens to poets when they retire, how they will look at a beautiful night sky and no longer feel obliged to construct metaphors. The piece almost read as if it could be Philip Larkin’s letter declining the post of poet laureate in 1984.

Martin Jackson filled the stage with a very different type of energy. Just as memorable as his poetry were the brief beguiling snapshots of his life given between poems. Jackson appears to evoke everything that we want our writers to be – handsome, busy-minded folk living in houses with wardrobes propped up with discarded early drafts and shelves full of books with the covers ripped off.

The last poet to read was Niall Campbell, a writer introduced with much glee by his fellow Scotsman, Lumsden (they both celebrated Campbell being the first Scot to win a Gregory in 16 years by downing a glass of Scotch on stage before the reading).

Campbell’s poetry was worth the wait however. His voice is that of a small-town boy who can see the big picture and his ability to imbue the minutiae of a remote life with a profound universality puts me in mind of Michael Longley.

In the past, the Eric Gregory awards have proved a fairly sound prophecy of the people who will go on to achieve great things in the world of poetry. If the five people who read last Wednesday are where poetry is heading, then I can sleep easy tonight knowing that we are in safe hands.

It is a real honour to be part of a group that hosts such talented new writers and I look forward to bringing you new work by some of this year’s Gregory Winners in Silkworms' exciting imminent rebirth this year.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Out With The Old | Introduction | It's time for us 'worms to moth

2011-06-20T21:28:00.000+01:00

Regular readers may have noticed things have slowed down here at the Silkworms Ink. And you may be wondering, has the whizz grown bored of the shape of our sails? No. We have been exceedingly busy, but behind the scenes…

Silkworms 2.0. Is. Coming.

Since we launched Silkworms, over a year ago now, things have gone terribly well. The sheer quantity and quality of submissions we receive every week has led us to consider what more we can do, both for our writers and our readers. I won’t delve into the details of those considerations now, as we still have the nooks and crannies of our plans to pack tightly – although I will say, we are going bigger. And better. And soon.

So, until then, when we return to full flow, revamped and glorious, we will leave you with this last week of ‘the old way’ for you to masticate over slowly. I recommend nibbling.

Sayonara for now, and see you all soon. In conclusion, watch this space.

James Harringman
Editor-in-Chief

Lunacy | Poetry | Cane Hill

2011-06-06T19:51:00.000+01:00

When Elizabeth Bishop wrote of ‘the tragic man that lies in the house of Bedlam’, she imbued such subtle tragedy in her refrain from the compassionate pronoun ‘who’.

I think that my fascination with mental asylums began with the David Bowie song, The Bewlay Brothers. Insanity’s map is in constant flux, as is our treatment of those we deem as ‘insane’.

The context of an act is often the only thing that gives it the requisite weirdness to be seen as the act of a lunatic. The most seemingly innocuous of gestures, statements and thoughts can be seen as clear evidence for lunacy when our perception of the subject is coloured by a preconceived madness.

A sane man may sit on a park bench, mesmerised by a cloud that bares a resemblance to a family member. When a madman does this, it becomes an altogether more sinister piece of behaviour in our perception. Even that most unequivocally sinful act, murder, can flit from being an evil deed to a symptom of a sickness depending on our perception of the agent, and indeed our understanding and sympathy towards psychopathy.

As medicine’s influence has shifted clumsily from the shaman to the scientist, so too have our ideas about mental illness. No longer are the madman’s ravings a hallmark of demonic possession to be subdued through torture – we have moved from Bedlam to the WLMHT, via Craiglockhart. Our exorcisms are now humanely replaced with sedative drugs.

But have we ever known how to show compassion to those whose thoughts stray from the social norm? Can we conflate medication with treatment? In sedating the insane, are we not replacing a concrete cell with a cell that bares the appearance of a human body?

Cane Hill

When I was eighteen, I broke into an abandoned mental asylum in Coulsdon called Cane Hill. When I was younger, this was seen as an adolescent pilgrimage akin to setting foot in a haunted mansion. I do not recommend this dangerous and illegal act to anyone, and see myself as lucky to have not died as a result of the hazardous excursion.

It was however, formative in my education of how the insane have been treated by society. Getting lost in the lamp-lit labyrinth of wards and cells and the mortuary and chapel and discarded detritus was a kinaesthetic experience that no wiki could ever provide.

I wrote a poem about it when I was around twenty. This is it.

Cane Hill

Averos Compono Animos

The ominous sag of the floor at our feet

as though walking on a gloved hand

over a patchwork of spread newspapers stained sepia by the years

dustily detailing developments of what the Russians were up to.

Huddling in the projected safety of our torchlight

casting Venn diagrams in which to step.

Embarrassed to be eighteen and afraid, they coax me

into trying on a jacket left hanging solo in a balsa closet.

Smell of dust and piss as it grips

my shoulders like an angry parent.

Clatter of the rusty can litter when kicked

across derelict corridors once sanitary

and the unseen scuttle of others and bugs

or screams held in stone tape.

We lasted an hour in all

before returning to our torn corner of fence.

A silent ride home, rifling through our loot:

three syringes, a nurse’s coat baring a Latin motto,

a duty rota dated ’82 and a small pile

of clumsy polaroids:

the cold chamber, the smashed window, the pew barnacled with moss

and me in a too-small jacket.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Lunacy | Introduction | Moon Myth & Madness

2011-05-30T19:42:00.000+01:00

“Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations and ages is it the rule.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

The waxing and waning of the moon was once believed to affect all living things. A waxing moon was thought to radiate energy which stimulated growth; as it waned, the energy diminished. Superstitious gardeners and farmers planned their sowing so that the young plants could grow with the moon, and the plants were best picked, or trees felled, when a moon on the wane was weakening their resistance. The flesh of animals killed under a waning moon was likely to shrink in the pot, and business deals and marriages had the best chance of success if they were timed to take effect as he moon began to wax.

The moon was also widely thought to influence human beings, and until about 100 years ago it was officially recognized as the prime cause of madness. A lunatic, as the word suggests and as the Lunacy Act of 1842 clearly stated, was a person ‘afflicted with a period of fatuity in the period following after the full moon’.

JH

Wind | Fiction | Wind In The Willows Reboot To Tackle The Financial Crisis?

2011-05-25T16:02:00.000+01:00

An interesting announcement in the Guardian today; the estate of Kenneth Grahame has made it clear that they intend to release a sequel to The Wind In The Willows, tentatively titled, The Wind In Willows: Wealth Always Wakes, written by none other than famed thriller-writer James Patterson. It’s not as bizarre a choice as you might think – Patterson has written about ambiguously animal creatures dwelling in a land of humans before, in his sensically-titled Maximum Ride series about avian hybrids, and he’s even ventured into children’s fiction once or twice, in his collaboration with Neil McMahon, Toys, a charming novel about sentient toys, and a couple of Alex Cross adventures for younger readers, Pop Goes The Weasel and Four Blind Mice (which also reminds us of his skill at taking on the reins of an existing franchise).

Patterson actually mentioned the project on his personal website, saying how proud he was to take the series on. He also explained that this will be an ‘updated version of the classic tale’ that brings Toad, the greedy and charming capitalist pig, ‘kicking and screaming into the twentieth-century’ by exposing the darker side of his actions.

‘It’s going to be a wild ride…we’re actually going to take it further than the originals ever did. So in my story, Toad doesn’t just stop at motor-cars. He buys a limousine, then a helicopter, then a plane, and ends up destabilising the world economy. I mean, this guy is a selfish dick, and I wanted to show that side to him. The wealthy, chauvinist, materialist rogue no longer has a place in our fiction, even as an anti-hero. He’s a banker, and that word itself has now taken on a whole pejorative vocabulary of its own.”

Patterson did assure fans of the original that his book would be suitable for young children (the scene in which Toad, high on cocaine smuggled in to his minimum-security prison, garrottes a washerwoman before fondling her small, child-like breasts will only be available as part of a special omnibus), with the satirical subtext visible to adult readers without being crass.

“It’s a wonderful story, and I think it can be relatable to today’s children with the minimum of tinkering. The kids may not understand that Mr. Badger’s intense misanthropy is a result of his psychologically-scarring experiences murdering women and children in the second Gulf War, and they probably won’t pick up on the exact nature of the close relationship between Mole and Ratty either. But they’ll love to see these colourful, clearly-defined personalities engaging in plenty of action without too much plot, nuance or character development slowing things down.”

This won’t be the first Willows sequel, of course (William Horwood wrote several books in the series) or even the first one to try and feel like a big man by stamping all over the proverbial sandcastle of a beloved seventy-year-old children’s book and proving how it’s appalling when considered as an adult’s social manifesto. Jan Needle’s 1981 Wild Wood recast the predatory stoats, ferrets and weasels as hard-working, oppressed members of the rural proletariat, struggling against the lazy aristocratic Toad, the petty bourgeois Ratty, and Mole, who by his wide-eyed enthusiasm for the comforts of Toad’s lifestyle, is clearly a class traitor. I’m sure we can all agree that such a book definitely needed to be written.

But, of course, another outdated but much-admired British archetype is currently being given the modern-day dust-off, in the form of James Bond; it’s probably fitting that the reins of his rotten funereal carriage are being handed to an American writer, Jeffrey Deaver. We know that Deaver is a dedicated researcher (while beginning work on his first thriller about quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, he has confessed that he spent an entire forty minutes lying very still on his bed one Tuesday morning, only moving to scratch his nose), so thankfully we can be sure that the re-booted Bond of Carte Blanche, an Afghanistan veteran, won’t just be a vague pastiche of well-known English traditions; we know, for example, that he enjoys Radio Four.

Long before we get to see any of that, however, we will enjoy the BBC’s modern-day Sherlock Holmes reboot, Sherlock, returning to our television screens, including a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which this editor is especially intrigued to see considering that the plot would make absolutely no sense in a modern-day context. But then again, neither did The Blind Banker, although it did manage to get in a few pointless swipes at bankers for being greedy, which is obviously how you make a classic appear relevant and urgent in a modern reboot.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Wind | Introduction | As kingfishers catch fire

2011-05-23T21:44:00.000+01:00

It is said that when the sea is calm, it is because the kingfishers are sitting on their nests. Halcyon is another name for the bird, which in Greek means ‘conceiving on the sea’, and before it was known that the birds nest in burrows, the belief was widespread that they laid their eggs at sea in floating nests of fishbone.

According to Greek legend, Halcyone, daughter of the god of the winds, married Ceyx, son of the day star. Ceyx drowned in a storm at sea, and the gods, taking pity on his wife, restored him to life, but turned them both into kingfishers. For 14 days of each year, while Haycyone is on her nest, her father holds back the wind – hence the expression, ‘halcyon days’. This legend may also make sense of the traditional country belief that dead kingfishers make good weather-vanes – their bodies are said to turn in the direction of the wind.

Sitcom | Television | Roseanne: No Holds Barred

2011-05-18T17:35:00.000+01:00

Roseanne is America's greatest sitcom. There, I've said it.

At least in its early years, the show was a perfectly formed, and perfectly performed, slice of working-class America. It was consistently intelligent and emotionally mature. And (as if this matters) it gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs.

I didn't even watch the show when it aired in the '90s but discovering it on DVD has been a revelation. I was reminded of its subtleties this week when I read Roseanne's fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes ructions, posted on New York Magazine's site. Take a few minutes to go and read it too.

And if you need any convincing, here are a few choice extracts:

'The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognize that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.'

'I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV.'

'Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.'

'Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.'

All done? Good, wasn't it! Now, for balance, I recommend this rather po-faced response from The Guardian.

Although the network's worries over Roseanne are legendary, what's amazing is that very little of this tension shows up onscreen. In fact, watching seasons back to back on DVD, it's striking that the show has a coherence that's very rare for this era of TV. (Again, I am choosing not to address the last few seasons, when the show was chasing ratings and its star was struggling with mental illness.)

Look at the way each episode begins. I think we learn a lot about television's preoccupations from studying title sequences (that's how I justify the time I spend on Youtube, anyway). Roseanne's one-shot opening is exemplary in the way that it prepares us not just for the show's thematic concerns, but also for its political challenge.

Sorry about the quality of the video, but hopefully you'll have grasped the boisterous to-and-fro of the family unit, the deft sketching of interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, the way the kitchen table is a locus around which discourse occurs. It's a conversation to which we do not have access, true, but the rasping bluesy harmonica conveys its earthiness and its wit. Offsetting the liveliness of the group, the smooth 360° camera movement speaks to their emotional connection.

It is a camera movement that begins and ends with Roseanne, capped off (wonderfully) with her laughter: raucous, unself-conscious, enjoying her family and herself. And this is the nature of that political statement - the show dares to suggest that matriarchy, working-class life, irritation and happiness are all compatible. It's simple enough but I'm struggling to think of anything quite so progressive on our screens today.

Nicolas Pillai
Film Editor

Sitcom | Chapbook | Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill by Phil Brown

2011-05-18T16:57:00.000+01:00

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill

Phil Brown (18.5.11)

A commentary on every poem in Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill written with revision for A-Level exams in mind and geared towards students of A-Level English Literature. This commentary is meant to enhance the reader’s understanding of some of the ideas in Sheers’ poetry. It is also entirely free.

APPENDICES TO THE COMMENTARY

Appendix I - Lyrics to Susan’s House by Eels

Going over to Susan's House, wandering south down Baxter Street
Nothing hiding behind this picket fence
There's a crazy old woman smashing bottles on the sidewalk where her house burned down two years ago
People say that back then, she really wasn't that crazy

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight

Down by the Doughnut Prince, a 15-year-old boy lies on the sidewalk with a bullet in his forehead
In a final act of indignity, the paramedics take off all his clothes for the whole world to see while they put him in the bag
Meanwhile, an old couple argues inside the 'Queen Bee', the sick fluorescent light shimmering on their skin

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, she's gonna make it right

Take a left down Echo Park
A kid asks do I want some crack
TV sets are spewing Baywatch
Through the windows into black

Here comes a girl with long brown hair, who can't be more than seventeen
She sucks on a red popsicle as she pushes a baby girl in a pink carriage
And I'm thinking, 'That must be her sister. That must be her sister, right?'
They go into the seven-eleven and I keep walking, and I keep walking

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight
Going over to Susan's House

Appendix II – To Speak of Woe That is Marriage by Robert Lowell

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge.

This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—

whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick? Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant."

Appendix III - Some Notes from AQA

Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers

Skirrid Hill continues to attract an enthusiastic if still surprisingly small following with Sheers vigorous style clearly able to engage and challenge. His anthology presents a reflective, careful reader with many themes that align with the struggle for identity in ways that can be visceral as well as delicate, broad as well as extremely personal. It is important to a successful study of the anthology that centre’s do not pigeon-hole Sheers as simply a nationalistic poet who looks inwards to issues of Welsh identity but one is looking outwards too, taking in those moments in life which can seem paradoxical and bizarre, addressing moments where there is a complex interfacing of life, death and relationships.

Despite his growing published work across all the genres, Sheers remains a relatively enigmatic, restless poet clearly embarked upon a journey of discovery and about whom, significantly fewer biographical studies have yet been made. This works to candidates’ advantage because their focus more clearly rests on the language, form and structure of his verse rather than on the man himself. That said, candidates this time were keener to explore the question that invited a measured, argued response to a general theme rather than the one that began with a focus on a specific poem and invited validation and repudiation of its centrality. A little disappointingly, in response to either poem, some candidates offered little by the way of balanced debate and saw the question as a way of simply explaining the content of two or three poems, broadly linked to a theme.

Question 6

This was by far the more popular of the questions on Scarred Hill, offering candidates the opportunity to explore their own choice of poems from this broadly diverse collection. Whilst there were many strong responses, one examiner wrote that some candidates who had been offered ‘a gift of a question’ then ‘proceeded with ingratitude and uncertainty, attempting to explore different themes in a perfunctory, generalised counter-argument’ or they ‘wallowed in a morass of loss’ without ever really explaining what had been lost and with what consequences.

Perhaps these candidates were truly ‘spoilt for choice’ and could not arrive at satisfactory evaluative comments because of this. The poems that lent themselves most readily to the argument were Border Country, Mametz Wood, Y Gaer, The Hill Fort, Marking Time and Amazon although the poem that received most attention from candidates, interestingly, was Keyways. Counter-arguments usually cited examples of more celebratory poems such as The Equation, inheritance or Stitch in Time with better responses developing insightful comment or challenging the idea of loss at all.

Certain confident candidates were able to convince that Sheers depiction of loss really to revealed what was gained in terms of experience, understanding of self, others and the world. There was evidence that some candidates were trying to shape responses to past papers to fit the requirements of this year’s question with inevitable loss of focus. To this effect some candidates offered plenty of examples of Sheers’ treatment of separations suggesting either directly or by inference that separation equated to loss. Those who were able to suggest in their extension or counter-arguments that Sheers also dealt with moments of elision, repair and coming-together, were to be commended, especially where these moments were expertly pinpointed, analyzed and evaluated.

Successful candidates:

• Chose highly appropriate poems for the exploration of Sheers’ treatment of loss and its effects or chose equally appropriate poems to validate their counter-argument

• Analysed Sheers’ choices of form, structure and language

• Explored a wealth of Sheers’ poetic techniques and articulated his intent in order to create interesting lines of argument and counter-argument

Less successful candidates:

• Simply offered broad agreement with the statement and struggled to even illustrate loss effectively

• Ignored the question’s key words

• Made broad generalisations about the effects produced by Sheers’ choice of form, structure and language often asserting rather than illustrating their points

Question 7

This question had relatively few takers despite the comparatively comforting prospect of exploring a superficially straightforward poem. Interestingly too, there were some responses that neglected the punning title, missing an obvious way into Sheers’ musings on relationships between father and son and their relationship with their environment. Most problematic, however, was the interpretation of the phrase ‘key to this collection’.

The metaphor of the key should suggest an unlocking of something or a focus on some feature so fundamental as to be indispensible to a clear understanding of the anthology. Few such insightful readings were apparent with candidates, instead, suggesting typicality of theme, technique, intent or features. In some respects the named poem is a testament to the permanence of life despite its frailty and smallness, set against a backdrop of the awesome grandeur of natural world.

To validate the idea of ‘key’, links needed to be made to the rest of the collection and here it was obvious that some candidates had a very hazy knowledge of the structure and content of the collection as a whole. The named poems’ central themes of identity, contrasts, endurance, loss and the natural world should have been fundamental to a balanced argument and counter-argument, where the choice of at least one suitable substitute ‘key’ poem should have been possible.

Successful candidates:

• Produced a balanced debate which considered, developed and agreed or refuted the idea that the named poem is the key to this collection in a thoughtful, engaged, incisive manner

• Linked Farther to a range of other relevant poems and/or made an arresting case for another poem being the key

• Explored Sheers’ form, structure and language choice with confidence always citing examples relevantly and with analytical significance.

Less successful candidates:

• Simply dismissed the idea that Farther could be the key to the collection

• Wrote basic accounts of the poem and/or others in the collection, with little relevant or developed reference to form, structure and language choice

• Were unable to move beyond generalisations and assertions.

Appendix IV - Past Questions

Themes:

Separation between men and women

Striking and unusual imagery

Loss

Difficult Issues

Key Poems:

Y Gaer and The Hill

Border Country

Farther

Skirrid Fawr (fitting conclusion)

Appendix V - Possible Themes and Patterns:

Man against nature -Domestication

Masculinity

Death

Generation gaps

Modernisation and Americanisation

Playing roles (psychology?)

Spines?

Relationships

Everything is like writing

Magic

The use of titles to challenge or refute the content - sometimes as part of the poem

Titles often include puns; the duality of meaning at the heart of the ideas

Tercets - not sure really why. Long enough to develop a thread of thought without over-inflating it!

The rhythms of natural speech

Use of real people, places and his family

Natural imagery

Enjambed lines that create a conversational and fluid movement. Ideas organically develop and weave together to form larger patterns.

Contrasts between beauty and cruelty - a necessary balance and stability, particularly in rural life

Demonstratives to guide the reader to see

Metaphors of theatricality

Images that have surfaces and depths - the darker elements of human life can not always be seen

Incise, probing language

Use of epigraphs or introductory notes

Archetypal characters and rural cast

Gentle rhyme and alliteration to add weight to ideas, moods and feelings

Imagery of cuts and breaks

Poems that begin en media res

The repeated metaphor of marks to pinpoint moments of transition, growth or change

Poems in clusters or at periodic moments to develop an overarching idea

Use of the first person, though not always the poet speaking

Reclaiming of symbols for use in a different context e.g. the flags

Poetry in dialogue with other art forms e.g. sculpture, photography, song