Kennys Is Going, Now The Waste Land

Kennys Bookstore (to the right) is perhaps the most famous and eccentric independent book shop in Ireland - Brendam Behan read there, along with many other legends (every Irish author worth their salt has read there and some Yanks too) - and now the Galway institution is closing; or what may be worse, going all virtual.

I read at Kennys for the launch of one of my recent collections (the pints after blur the memory) - actually, it was, oddly, the day after my wedding. Flushed and well-dressed, I read for a good crowd.

Mr. Kenny himself sat there puffed up in a three-pice suit at a huge desk in the middle of one of the rooms where books were on sale - slitting open letters with a pen-knife and gruffly answering the old black phone as browsers shifted around him, like some Kubla Kane of Books.

I found a copy of Map-Maker's Colours, the first anthology I co-edited, when I was 19-20, with the Belfast poet Martin Mooney. The reading was fun - read with Kevin Higgins.

My photo was taken for the walls - those famous walls adorned with the photos of the great and the good in the literary world. I had hoped to have more than two years of infamy on that wall, which now comes, allegorically, down like those at Jericho. I wonder if the photos of Behan and Co. will go virtual, too?

In the meantime, we need to panic. If all such independents disappear, the waste land that will come after will not be suited to the life of poets and writers, who like the wine and cheese served in such places.

Interview With Al Alvarez

I am interviewing Al Alvarez tomorrow (he is pictured here beside me, at the Oxfam poetry event I organized to feature him earlier this year) at his home.

Al Alvarez - poet, anthologist, critic, and great friend to poets - has long been one of my favourite literary figures and an inspiration - so I am quite honoured that one of London's most respected literary magazines, Magma, invited me to conduct the interview for their latest issue, out this December.

In October, Books In Canada will be running my long review of Alvarez's latest book of criticism, The Writer's Voice.

Eratio Now Up

I can now report that my work is included in

eratio postmodern poetry issue six, fall 2005

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com

reader and writer do look this one up -

it is edited by the fine poet Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

New American Writing Needs You

NEW AMERICAN WRITING / 369 Molino Avenue / Mill Valley, CA 94941

Dear Friend of New American Writing:

Because we are currently receiving less than $1 per issue of the magazine’s “sell-through” at Barnes & Noble and Borders, which unfortunately dominate the bookstore trade and use a heavy hand with small providers such as literary magazines, it’s urgent that we reduce our reliance on income from those chains and thus also our distributor, Ingram Periodicals. If we are not able to do so, we will be forced financially to cease publication of a magazine that has existed since 1971.

Therefore, we ask you to order the magazine directly from us using the following methods:

(1) Purchasing a three-issue subscription for $27, a savings of $1 per annual issue. To do so, send a check to the address above. If you wish to use a credit card, order through our website:
http://newamericanwriting.com.

(2) Purchasing individual issues as they appear from the same address, by check or by credit card through our website.

The current issue, No. 23, was published in June. It contains new poems by Mahmoud Darwish; The Black Heralds of César Vallejo, translated by Clayton Eshleman; a selection of contemporary Vietnamese poetry translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover; edited by Todd Swift, the work of twenty younger Canadian poets including Christian Bök and Lisa Robertson; and poetry by Donald Revell, George Albon, Elizabeth Robinson, Andrew Joron, Clayton Eshleman, Stacy Doris, Laynie Browne, Linh Dinh, Joseph Lease, Anna Rabinowitz, Timothy Liu, Sally Keith, and Aaron Shurin, among many other outstanding U.S. poets.

Over the years, we have published more than 2,000 poets including many of you receiving this letter. We are proud of our record of introducing exciting new poets and poetries.

If we can add 400 new subscribers, we can insure the longevity of the magazine the next three years.

Please join us as a subscriber and forward this message to your friends.

Sincerely, Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover

The Like Of It

Another day - another anthology. So sighs the world-weary professional poetry editor (I am currently trying to meet a deadline for my sixth anthology, due next week at the publishers in Canada).

And yet, they serve a purpose - they serve notice. They demand that certain poets are noticed.

In Britain, where debut collections are cruelly limited, both by perhaps overly conservative standards, and rigorous market concerns (with less arts funding than, say, in Canada), very few good poets get their own books out, and the battle is always on to draw attention to those who should be so published.

So, this anthology, The Like Of It, promises to highlight with a very strong marker some exceptionally gifted younger poets who - in a just, stylish, poetry-smart and less po-faced society - would all already have first or second books. It is thus a needed as well as superb offering. I should add I know most of these poets, having met them over my last few years in London. I am glad to have met them.

Here's the blurb from the back:

Whilst anthologies often play up their diversity, the pleasure of 'the like of it' lies in the fact that these writers seem to be in conversation with each other, all working towards a mutual idea about what literature should be. They share sensuousness, a subtlety of line, an intelligent sense of humour and a seriousness about their art, born out of the knowledge that: 'Nothing's real until you say it, and even then - / knowing how to do things with words can be terrible.' Inventive, well-read and wise, these Songs of Experience are a real treat for those who like their poetry grown-up. — Clare Pollard

Baring and Rogerson are pleased to invite you to the launch of The Like Of It
an anthology of new poems by
Karen Annesen, Edward Barker, Katy Evans-Bush,
Heather Holden, Simon Rees-Roberts, Liane Strauss

6.30-8.30
Friday, 30 September 2005 (reading at 7.30)
Rebecca Hossack Gallery
35 Windmill Street London W1T 5NQ

Forgetting About Simple Minds

The T.S. Review is likely to exhaust some of its critical goodwill by revealing that one of its absurd guilty pleasures is that it uncritically loves Simple Minds. The aformentioned band had its greatest moment exactly 20 years ago (1985), when its uncharacteristic anthem to teenage love, Don't You (Forget About Me) was America's number one song for what seemed that entire summer. It had been featured in the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club.

There tend to be snickers and ironic winks in the U.K., but it is possible to argue that Simple Minds were, simply, the biggest UK alternative rock band of the 80s in the U.S. (discounting Depeche Mode which is a different and somewhat later story) which is no mean achievement (U2 is excluded for being Irish, of course), especially when one considers how difficult Oasis and Robbie Williams have found the search for a U.S. top ten position, let alone number one with a bullet.

At any rate, the song from the Hughes film has entered the soul of any preppie alternative kid who came of age in North America, and danced at that time. The song lends itself to precisely the sort of skyward-posing whirling gestural preciousness that makes 80s music preposterous to those who were not there, but to those who were, ah, it is sheer caviar. If music is a time machine to when one was happiest, and best-looking, most naive and heart-crushingly in love, then let such music thrive.

Simple Minds are now back, with an album which seems to be titled Black and White 050505. Nothing on the new album gives one the same visceral thrill of the early songs (New Gold Dream is their best album for its religiose, glimmering, everything-which-rises-shall-converge guitar-and-Kerr-transcendence) but it has its almost-moments of OTT greatness. Make no mistake, Simple Minds are the sort of thing we will miss when they are truly gone: unalloyed flamboyant eucharistic bombast.

Oddly, one of the new songs, "Stranger" is a bizarre and blatant cross between Madonna's "Mysterious Stranger" and Zooropa-era U2; as well as a tip of the hat to, naturally, their most famous song from the Reagan Era (the sha-la-la-las are a dead give away).

Lest we forget, Jim Kerr and the lads are actually great, and should be adored, despite their silly refusal to be put down, and their willingness to keep a ghost of their youthful strut and kick alive.

Sustainable Politics and the United Nations

There is a reason the United Nations exists. It was born from the ashes of Nazi Germany, and the war to defeat that power and its allies.

This week, pundits and other media types have been, along with sly politicos, crowing about the failure of the U.N. to reform itself, to get its act together.

The T.S. Review finds the claim that the United Nations is a failure a short-sighted, simplistic and ultimately defeatist position, which is, from a global perspective, also false.

The first consideration must be - who else, and how else - to discuss, negotiate and ultimately achieve truly international consensus on key issues? The only alternative to the U.N. (and one which Mr. Bolton is aware of) is, indeed, an alternate coalition, perhaps, in a post-modern sense constantly shifting, formed and lead by the dominant hyper-power of the day, in this case America. The idea that such random, open-ended alliances are in any true sense an equivalent to a body consisting of approximately 200 member nation states is counter-factual, for the very reason that such coalitions come into being precisely to seek objectives (often military) that run counter to the interests of many other, often opposed nations (as with Iraq).

To wit: the United Nations exists precisely not to replicate the existing hierachies that some very powerful nations might wish to impose on the world order - as was the case with Hitler's Germany - but instead to approximate to some sort of balanced diplomatic (and perhaps Hegelian) struggle, in which oppositional forces clash, merge and mesh as some stable median point is agreed to; but such an inter-national forum was predicated on the idea of some sort of mutual sense of responsibility.

The failure identified as belonging to the United Nations - the failure to stop Rwandan Genocide, and so on - in fact belongs to the far starker world community, bereft of anything to govern its actions but the crudest self-interest and real politique. It is, in fact, the members who make up the U.N., and too often (always?) bring their limited, national interests to the table, that are responsible for the failure to achieve greater and wider agreements and goals.

Clearly, America's position with regards to the world, the U.N., and many binding international treaties at this time - from Kyoto to world courts - is in direct contradiction to the aims and ideals of the U.N. - in so far as America's current stated foreign policy is to seek the clear best interests of its own people first. That such a policy can be then blanketed in wider universal claims for world good is silly, and the hypocrisy is so evident that it becomes terror's best recruiting sergeant. No nation can have it both ways, though America and the UK via Tony Blair's senseless preaching faux-idealism, seek to: you cannot pursue naked self-interest and achieve wide-scale global justice with the same words and acts.

And of course, time and time again, this is the case, with arms control, the environment, the arms trade, and world health and poverty goals. To take is not to give; and to genuinely aim to ameliorate unjust distributions of wealth is not to withhold money unless narrow faith-based interests are served.

What is needed is simple: a sustainable politics, one which actually seeks to envision mutual, long-range, cross-border concerns, and aims to devalue nation states as instruments of self-aggrandizement. This would have to mean the end to the use of conflict to resolve disputes (except in the most radical of instances); a world economy that took into account global warming and other environmental concerns, and which severely limited the manufacture and sales of weapons - among other things.

It isn't the U.N. which constantly "fails". It is us - supposedly free people - who fail to act, to bring into being organisations and policies that are ethical, non-violent, and sustainable.