Chichester

Wednesday 30 January, New Park 7.30pm £3: Andrew Bailey reads from Zeal. This is a Chichester Open Mic reading so plenty of open spots.

Wednesday 27 February, New Park 7.30pm £3: Brendan Cleary, one of the most gifted performers of his generation and editor of the recently relaunched Echo Room will be reading.

Thursday 28 March, Chichester Library: John Haynes

Petersfield

Thursday 19 February, Upstairs at the Square Brewery, 7.15 for 7.30pm: Attila the Stockbroker from time. This is a Write Angle event with open mic spots.

Brighton

Tuesday 29 January, The Hope, Queens Road 7.30pm £4: An Evening of Modern Poetry with Ian Patterson and Richard Parker

Thursday 28 February, RedRoaster Café: Tim Beech and Wioletta Grzegorzewska. Pighog event.

London Town

Friday 15 February, British Library Conference Centre £7.50/5. B.S. Johnson his life and legacy. Event celebrating 80th anniversary of B.S.Johnson and more importantly reissues of novels, new anthology of uncollected work and a DVD(!) of TV work etc including Fat Man on the Beach. Booking info here: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event140205.html and Jonathon Coe giving details of publications etc here: http://www.jonathancoewriter.com/blog.php/?p=334

So, its all kicking off. Highlights probably Brendan Cleary and of course B.S. Johnson….We love you all!

morphrog 6 [poetry in the extreme) is now online here: http://www.morphrog.com/. morphrog is the more experimental, avant garde online outlet of Lewes based Frogmore Press. Issue 6 includes work from south coast writers Liz Adams, Robin Daglish & Martin Myers and others from further afield including a great two line number by Rob Miles, ‘All England’: http://www.morphrog.com/morphrog6/Robert%20Miles.htm.

Happy new year and all that, we love you all!

Caitlin Doherty, Jonny Liron, Becky Cremin & Ryan Ormonde: Tuesday 27 November, 7.30 PM, The Hope, Brighton. £4

Martin Myers: Wednesday 28 November 2012, 7.30 PM, New Park Centre, Chichester + open mic + refreshments in the refurbished bar £3

Brendan Cleary, Tony Flynn & Rob Hamberger: Thursday 29 November 2012, RedRoaster Cafe, Brighton 7.30 for 8.00 darlings £5  

Santa Claus (apparently) + open mic: Wednesday 12 December, 7.30 PMSt Faith’s Church, Havant. Free. On edit: CANCELLED, no Santa boohoo. 

John Hegley: Tuesday 18 December, 7.30 PM, upstairs at the Square Brewery, Petersfield £4

Hallucinated Horse: New Latin American Poets Bilingual Edition

Edited and translated by Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Tom Slingsby

Pighog Press £7

I have some gripes about Hallucinated Horse, a ‘bilingual edition’ of ‘new Latin American poets’, which need to be dealt with up front. I’m unsure of the anthology’s target audience, but I’m guessing primarily English speaking poetry readers. I do not believe it will appeal overly to Spanish and Portuguese reading fans and aficionados of Latin American poetry; they will already own or have read the original texts. Hallucinated Horse insists however on its bilinguality with everything; poems, translator’s notes and biographical detail all presented in English and Spanish. Of course this is wholly admirable, but one consequence in a book of 56 pages, in which no poem exceeds a single page of text, is that only there are only 16 poems in the entire collection. It left me feeling a little short-changed.

Joint editors and translators, Nicole Cecilia Delgado & Tom Slingsby, counter such gripes in their notes, describing their collection of young (in their twenties & thirties) established writers from across the continent as a ‘show and tell’ sampler. And that’s a good description, many of the poems presented seem to be excerpts from longer work and there is an overall sense of dipping into a bag filled with small, shiny and endlessly quotable titbits. Reading the collection on a dull afternoon in Sussex there is unsurprisingly a sense of the exotic that in itself is very appealing and the collection delivers many little shocks of magic realism, surrealism and general myth-making of the first order. But it’s the wider ambiguities of much of the work that are really engaging; images that somehow run counter to prevailing notions of what constitutes reality, moments in which the absurd and the everyday morph beyond the bizarre or fetishistic. So, reading some lines about an Argentinian cyber punk, what’s strange are not the ‘turquoise pompom antennas’ or a ‘dead dog’s collar’ but rather the poems denouement, where

“At the bowling alley, you took out a box of crayons and they chucked you out, thinking they were some kind of strange cigarettes. You only wanted, on a sudden impulse, to write on the bathroom wall some mystic phrase like love and cows.”

(de Bonkei by Maria Eugenia Lopez)

Don’t you just wish you had been ejected from a bowling alley under similar circumstances?

As anthologies go this one is invigorating and fresh presenting writing that is rarely found elsewhere in UK small press magazines or poetry lists. At its best it is hopefully the start of something rather than an end in itself; it includes plenty of avenues down which to explore these poets further and it is perhaps an indication that more comprehensive collections are forthcoming.

Cecile Delgado and Tom Slingsby will present work from the anthology as part of Brighton’s Day of the Dead events on the 17 November 2012, 1.30PM at the Brighton Dome (entry is free).  

• Tuesday 23^rd October, RedRoaster Coffee House, 8pm. £5/3.

Afric McGlinchy & Paul Casey reading. Well travelled Irish Internationalists.

• Thursday 25 October, Redroaster Coffee House, 8pm. £5/3

Bernadette Cremin launches her new Pighog collection Loose Ends

+ Anthony Owen + Seni Seneviratne

• Monday 29th October, The Hope, 7.30pm £4

‘An Evening of Modern Poetry’: Anthony Barnett, (one time publisher of JH Prynne’s first collected edition?) + Connie Scozzaro + Andy Spragg. Cool poster:

The following poets are reading over the next few months at the New Park Centre, Chichester, kick-off 7.30 pm, £4 (info: chipoetry@yahoo.co.uk). New Park has been massively renovated this summer with an extended bar area and a new martial arts dojo….

Wednesday 31 October 2012, Stephen Boyce reading from his debut collection, Desire Lines, published by Arrowhead this year.

Wednesday 28 November 2012, Martin Myers. Myers, recently described as ‘subterranean’ has published nothing of significance for approaching 25 years now.

Wednesday 30 January 2013, Andrew Bailey, a Chichester poet reads from Zeal.

Wednesday 27 February 2013, Brendan Cleary. One of the finest voices of poetry in the last 30 years. His performances are legendary; a performance poet in the true sense never cheapening his work for effect, just a long hard look at the heart of us all. Cleary has recently relaunched the iconic and influential poetry magazine The Echo Room (http://www.pighog.co.uk/titles/the-echo-room.html).

We love you all!

There’s a fair bit going on this month; pick of the lot is probably The Salmon poets reading in that Brighton on the 23 October

Chichester:

Stephanie Norgate

Thursday 4 October, 7.30 pm, Chichester Library, £4

Stephanie Norgate launches her second Bloodaxe collection The Blue Den

+ Linda Kelsall-Barnet (gtr. classical) + open mic + free wine

Wednesday 31 October, 7.30, New Park Cinema, £3

Stephen Boyce (http://stephenboycepoetry.co.uk) reads from his latest collection Desire Lines

+ open mic but no guitar + no free wine (revolutions have been won and lost on less)

between Havant and Chichester…

WordSouth is organising an open mic event at The Funtington Time Machine, 7.30pm, Wednesday 10 October

No mention of guitarists or wine but the venue is ‘stuffed full of old clocks, computers and other bits of machinery, some reassembled’. Info here: http://wordsouth.org.uk/#/events/4542854143

Petersfield:

Tuesday 16^th October, The Market Brewery, Market Square 7.30pm

Write Angle present Paul Lyalls + open mic

Info & scary photography: http://petersfieldwriteangle.co.uk/

Brighton:

Tuesday 23^rd October, RedRoaster Coffee House, 8pm. £5/3.

Afric McGlinchy & Paul Casey reading. Two top-notch Irish poets with an international flavour published by the mighty Salmon.

     Now I sleep with buses and pipes,

     pylons and beggars reflected thrice in glass.

     Mobile phones and mini-skirts flirt my name

     while coffee-shop buskers point tourists to pavement art.

     What will I not endure?

     Paul Casey, Marsh

Thursday 25 October, Redroaster Coffee House, 8pm. £5/3

Bernadette Cremin launches her new Pighog collection Loose Ends

+ Anthony Owen + Seni Seneviratne

Details of this years festival are now out in the open. Most films showing at New Park cinema but check the full details here:  http://www.chichestercinema.org/film-festival

There are a number of films with a poetic angle though sadly no We Are Poets which I had somehow assumed would get a showing. Most interesting probably Sam Riley playing Sal Paradise in On The Road, this seems to be part of a minor resurgence of interest in Beat mythology (Howl last year and Kill Your Darlings due in 2013). There’s been mixed reviews for Walter Salles’ film with a lot of people suggesting it almost inevitably misses some of the Benzedrine fuelled excitement of the original typescript – still one to check out (I’ve got high hopes based largely on my negative expectations for the Howl film which turned out to be great).

No date on this yet but filmmaker & actress Amanda Waring and actress Virginia McKenna will participate in ‘an event of film, conversation and poetry’ as part of a Lewis Gilbert retrospective. No doubt more details soon.  Shakespeare gets a run out with three films of performances from the Globe Theatre.

Not poetry related particularly but High On The Walls has a great love for Ken Russell and his films. The festival is running a short retrospective of Delius: Song of Summer, The Boyfriend & Women in Love. No harm in any of these but what about an uncut Devils or some of the less well known Arena films? Anyway, HOTW will be at all three to raise a glass to a great man:

We love you Ken! We love you all!

Havant

Wednesday 11 July - Andrew Bailey, it says somewhere he’s based in Chichester, reads from his first collection Zeal published by Enitharmon. £3. The Spring, East Street, Havant @ 7.30.  Info here: http://wordsouth.org.uk/#/events/4542854143

He has some poems up on the (I think now defunct) Exultations & Difficulties site here: http://timtim.typepad.com/exultationsdifficulties/2008/02/herb-robert.html

Petersfield

Tuesday 17 July – Audi Maserati headlines at WriteAngle (http://www.petersfieldwriteangle.co.uk/). Upstairs at the Square Brewery 7.15.

The Future

And way off in the dim and distant future Thursday 4 October is National Poetry Day when Stephanie Norgate will be reading at Chichester Library and Patience Agbabi will be reading at the Lime Café in Brighton. No doubt much else besides.