I Read in Manchester Last Night

I read with Aoife Mannix, Chloe Poems and Helen Clare last night at the Manchester Poetry Festival, for the Citizen 32 magazine launch at Matt & Phreds Jazz Club - a trendy place with friendly staff and very good pizzas.

The magazine, edited by Dave Toomer and John Hall, is a crucial vehicle for bringing poems concerned with politics, social justice and progressive ideas, to readers, locally and globally.

It was a great event - filled with perhaps 150-200 people, seated at round tables - and the stage and sound was good. Aoife was particularly impressive. My own 25-minute set was very well received, and one of my most openly political and performance-oriented in some time, which brought back memories of my work in cabaret poetry in the summer of 1995, ten years ago.

Portrait of the Artist in Budapest

The artist (writer and photographer) Tony Kostadinov (as he was known to me then) took this photo of me presumably praying in Budapest sometime around the summer of 1999.

One of his portraits (in a similar vein) of me was used in my first collection, Budavox: poems 1990-1999, and his cover image graced the, well, cover. Fans of the Budavox sign will be glad it was captured for such a publication.

Below, find a poem from that rather gloomy and lascivious book (and both things are possible at once, especially in Bp.).

My math is poor, but I suspect I was about 34 then, I should add. I am now still in my 30s, but you know how time is about such things.

You may wish to check out the artist's website at www.antonius.atw.hu and read his thoughts on the artist and creative health, as well as take a peek at his other portraits, some of very fascinating and beautiful people.


Endangered Species

Under inspection by a group
of anti-ghosts, they stopped me half-through
the fade routine, at infrared, with a spray
sent finely over the air to find my general form,
looped thin titanium from skull to heel, pleased
well with their delivery. The young, thin scientist,
eager to be cruel, caressed his find, asking
if I needed anything else. I tried bolting,
scrutiny held fast. I could feel my eyes drying
as if they were paints. The technician
in his green coat scratched my iris
for results. He predicted I was
the last of my kind. This meant release.
The electric band glisters at my throat.

poem by Todd Swift

Interview With The Poet

The American poet Adam Fieled has interviewed me and the text can be found by going to www.artrecess.blogspot.com for the Philly Free School- then clicking on his name.

The man to the left (if you will) is Ezra Pound, who is mentioned in the interview.

I am neither Adam nor Ezra. I think biblical names for poets rather a good idea, don't you?

Get Sad

If 60s and early 70s TV was a formative part of my childhood - and it was - and if this has somehow affected my poetry - and it has - then no single show was a greater influence than Get Smart.

I loved Max(well) Smart, and his eventual wife, 99 in the way one does when one yearns to become the object of desire. Beyond the comedy of their relationship, I saw the erotic humours that made it work - he bumbling, but good, she sexy but competent - and I think this has shaped my onw private life to this day.

It is therefore with much sadness that I learn of the recent death of Don Adams, who portrayed Max.

Adams himself never amounted to much after this one great role, somehow unable to escape the watertight chamber of his own curious blend of daily suavity and screwball voice - as if KAOS itself had designed some far-fetched trap his life and career could never extricate themselves from - a giant magnet holding him back.

Those who collect my early chapbooks will know that my second pamphlet, The Cone of Silence, was named after a running gag on the show - the start of my many buried homages to popular film, TV and music in my poems. Now Max has gone to a cone that will be forever silent, unless the Chief lifts it on resurrection day.

Make Poetry History!

You've seen it here first: the new Oxfam National Poetry poster.

I helped commission and create it, working with Oxfam's Business Development Team, as the Oxfam-poet-in-residence.

This is part of the "Make Poverty History" campaign, and starts the next phase of Oxfam-poetry projects we're developing for 06-07.

The poster goes up in the 100 or so used books shops that make Oxfam the biggest such retailer in Europe.

More to the point, it features a donated poem from the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (a great honour).

It also presents cover images from some of the collections that pass through our doors and into the hands of poetry-lovers everywhere. Careful observation will yield a pleasant surprise in the top left corner.

Make Poetry History!

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.