Tanya Reinhardt Has Died

Sad news.

Regular contributor to nthposition, Tanya Reinhardt died in New York on 17 March age 63. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky, and taught at the universities of Tel Aviv and Utrecht.

In December 2006, she left Israel and taught at New York University. Tanya was married to the poet and translator Aharon Shabtai.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2038790,00.html

Chapman

Chapman 109 is just out, with a cover feature on Stewart Conn, at 70.

Chapman is "Scotland's quality literary magazine" and I am glad to note that I have six poems in the current issue.

Do check out their site at www.chapman-pub.co.uk and subscribe. As per an earlier post, it is important to support the magazines that form, and inform, poetry in the UK.

Poets in their youth

I am reading soon as a featured poet as part of the Shot from the Lip festival, associated via this month's New Blood - the fresh happening series, Wednesday, March 21, 7.30pm - start of a spring awakening, no doubt.

This at the Poetry Cafe, 22 Betterton Street, London.

In keeping with the Wedekindian theme, I will be joined by two young poets - Ashna Sarkar, described as "ridiculously young, ridiculously talented, ridiculously good" and the thrillingly-named Scroobiou Pip, a previous winner of Shortfuse's Poetry Idol.

www.myspace.com/newbloodpoetry

St. Patrick's Day and Niagara Falls

Eyewear wishes you a happy St. Patrick's Day.

Reflecting on the Irish genius in language, it is striking to consider that the greatest poet of the 20th century is arguably Yeats, the finest prose writer Joyce, and most influential playwright, Beckett. Should that be controversial, you might say that, waiting in those wings are Shaw, Heaney, Banville, Friel, Kavanagh (pictured) and Muldoon.... or - well, the list is implausibly long, if not endless.

Ireland and the Irish diaspora continue to yield much - recent books of 2007 include Maurice Riordan's The Holy Land (Faber), Eavan Boland's Domestic Violence (Carcanet) and Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark (Picador). Each of these is a poetry collection no reader of contemporary verse would want to be without.

In today's Guardian, Duhig's poem in memory of the great Irish-American poet, Michael Donaghy, is published (see below, also made available online).

As an Irish-Canadian (if such a hybrid is allowed) let me, as an aside, gently mourn the Guardian's recent decision to downgrade Niagara Falls in its giant poster of the "Wonders of the World" - both natural and man made. Despite the fact that Canada has more extraordinary examples of natural splendour than all of Europe combined, it remains blank on an otherwise busy map (America is given three or four wonders). Niagara Falls is just not there - but disappeared.

Households and schools across the UK will be enjoying the fun of putting stickers on the busy world, but Canada - as usual in the UK media - will be left barely-described, as a dull place not worth investigating - a few yards of snow.

Come to think of it, wasn't it another Irish genius, Wilde, who once noted that Niagara Falls was only a new bride's second biggest disappointment, on her honeymoon?


http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/poetry/story/0,,2035797,00.html

Poem by Alison Pick

Eyewear is very glad to present Alison Pick (pictured) this Friday.

Pick, a true rising star, was the winner of the 2005 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry, and the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising Canadian poet under the age of 35.

Her 2003 collection Question & Answer was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and for a Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. Alison's first novel, The Sweet Edge, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005 and has recently been optioned for film by Four Seasons Productions in Toronto.

Originally from Kitchener, Ontario, Pick has lived, read, published, and taught across the country. I am particularly pleased with this poem, as it deals with something that, even in March, resonates with my Canadian memories: snow.

So Much More To Say

The final snow-removal trucks
arrive like liberating troops. Up and up
the streets they charge to roses tossed
from windows. Winter’s a war finally won.
Throw back the drapes: warmth sashays in,
a kink, little inkling: we’ve felt this before,
forgotten it too, in the womb, in an earlier

life. Dreaming is easy in hours like these,
the mind’s backyard awash in new light,
but troops are troops, welcomed or not.
Still I haven’t said what I meant: something lost
will clear a space for something new to follow.
Ice in the harbour, for instance, melting,
starts the swell of spring. The Quakers,

for instance, worship in silence that breaks
in an outburst of words. The shattered things,
which is to say, the cool of your palm against
my thigh, which is to say there is no saying
for the dark and shady. And no perfection.
My broken parts have always been broken –
touch me. Touch me there.

poem by Alison Pick

Paris Reading Monday

I will be reading in Paris in a few days, with Claire Potter and Rufo Quintavalle.

Details below. Hope to see you there.

Berkeley Books of Paris

8 rue Casimir Delavigne

75006 Paris

Metro Odeon

7 PM, Monday March 19, 2007

Tradition and the Individual iPod

PN Review 174 (just out) has an editorial that all those concerned with poetry, in the UK and beyond, should read carefully.

The Arts Council is in the process of "restructuring". Some of this is good news, but the shift in emphasis is also leading to unexpected casualties: first, universally-respected (among poets and poetry publishers that is) Literature Director Gary McKeone was given his walking papers; next, "traditional" small magazines like The London Magazine have had their funding cut, completely. This signals a transition to support for new media outfits, performance poetry, and poetry that excites youth, and gets them involved.

Salt Publishing, for instance, has been awarded a "large grant" to develop its print-on-demand and online operation. David Lammy, the Culture Minister in the Blair government, and a big supporter of the Iraq war, is ironically overseeing the transformation of the publisher of 100 Poets Against The War - but then again, Salt's direction has (arguably) changed radically since 2003, as it now publishes a far wider spectrum of poets.

The editorial ends with the line "the triumph of performance poetry is clearly at hand".

I have long foreseen such a shift (see the introductions to my anthologies Poetry Nation, 1998, and Short Fuse, 2002) - and tried to ease (and influence) the transition by arguing that spoken word and performance /multimedia poetry should ground itself in a strong sense of the (literary) tradition of written (and published) poetry. As the digital age, and the celebrity age (different but connected because of capitalist tendencies) is relatively unstoppable in the short term, "youth" will begin to access - and share - their poetry (if and when they even do) in terms of what can be delivered via these new media. This will mean poems performed and recorded like files of songs, and, more and more, poems experienced via electronic devices.

The tragedy is not that new machines are entering our lives (telephones and planes did not stop Eliot or Auden from writing well) but that the funding agencies are mistaking the media for the message. The foundation of poetry in the UK has been, and must continue to be, small magazines and dedicated editors and publishers who know, and love, poetry, top to bottom. Ceasing to fund a legendary journal like The London Magazine and thereby terminating the legacy of Alan Ross, is equivalent to bulldozing listed buildings. In short, a spirit of conservation, if not conservatism, is paradoxically called for, at just this moment of radical change.

I have long been misread in the UK (in some circles) as the minstrel of new media mayhem. Far from it. I know the need to share poems with new generations of readers, to keep its spirit alive. But I also know that the spirit is non-negotiable. Poetry isn't for dumbing down. That's entertainment, and it's a different remit, a culture without gods.

The Arts Council - which supported my Oxfam series and does much good work to be sure - should continue to fund the great traditional paper little magazines, even as they support new forms of delivering poetry.

As for "youth" - Mr. Lammy should be careful as his hand doles out cash like sugar cubes. Empowered rappers, spoken word artists and poetry readers may continue to question the illegality of the war his government has prosecuted. Poetry is not merely efficacious and edifying - it can bite. That's a government of the teeth behind the tongue.