The devil's script sells you the heart of a blackbird

I have been listening, with increasing wonder and delight (and some horror), to an album of work recorded by Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill (October, 2004), produced and released posthumously, after this thirty something addled-abused genius died in a did-he-didn't-he murder/suicide - leaving an ambiguous corpse - and a brilliantly twisted, popular legacy of melancholy and melody - like some latter day Edgar A. Poe.

Some fans have written that this album is not his best. I can't imagine that to be true. It has the confidence of its tragic origins, a whiff of the grave that makes a dead artist smell sweet. From the eerie opening of "Coast To Coast" to the last track, "A Distorted Reality is Now A Necessity" the songs establish an immensely persuasive and disturbing presence - we're listening to the inner voice of a man hanging on the edge of self-destruction, but licking the candyfloss from the cliff's face. In this instance, the candy is junk.

Which imbues the double-meant tunes with the usual ache of waiting for a man, claiming to be enthralled by a woman. Junkie logic may not be advisable, but it lends great pathos and complexity to a syntax broken by the line, offering tortured soliloquies and allowing gravitas and grainy longing to shimmer through the pop ("burning every bridge that I cross / to find some beautiful place to get lost"). I am reminded, listening to this sad, doom-laden, beguiling masterwork, of the great Raymond Carver's claim that "everything else is gravy". I can't - literally - get these songs out of my mind, two months since I started - belatedly it must be said - first hearing (I nearly want to say using) them.

For the record, the major songs here are the two aforementioned, as well as "Pretty (Ugly Before)", "A Fond Farewell" and "Twilight".

http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/10/22/obit.elliott.smith.ap/

It was a marvellous night

No moondancing, but some very good poetry, very well read (it was one of the very best of the series so far). The Oxfam reading in Marylebone - the third from the end of the historic series now in its fourth year - was a great success last night (see previous post for list of readers). There were around 100 in attendance (including poets and volunteers) and over £700 was donated to the shop. The event started at 7.20 and ended at 10.05 pm - time for a drink and meal after. It went mainly without a hitch (though we'd run out of chairs) and the interval was particularly warm this time - much like a party. It was good to see so many poets in the audience, too.

Oxfam Summer Poetry Reading Tonight

Tuesday, May 29

7 Poets in ‘07 Summer Poetry Reading

Oxfam Poetry series

featuring seven poets:

Edward Barker

Siobhan Campbell

John Haynes

Frances Leviston

Valeria Melchioretto

Bernard O’Donoghue

Maurice Riordan

Edward Barker Born Rome, Italy. Moved UK uni degree mod history mod languages Magdalen College Oxford. Worked in film as actor, writer, directed short films, cinema manager, bulk carrier ship broker. Married, one child. Currently runs a small homeless organisation. and http://www.thepoem.co.uk/ website. Book of First Poems published in 2000. Also published in 2002 Forward anthology and The Like of It (2006). New pamphlet being prepared for Turtle Chaos press.

Valeria Melchioretto is an artist and writer who has lived in London since 1992. In 2004 her pamphlet Podding Peas was published by Hearing Eye. She won the New Writing Ventures Award 2005 for Poetry and her first full collection, The End of Limbo, will appear from Salt Publishing in 2007.

Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982, and moved to Sheffield in 1991. She read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and received an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. A pamphlet of her work, Lighter, was published by Mews Press in 2004, and was the PBS's Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2005. Her poems have also appeared in New Writing 14, Ten Hallam Poets and the TLS. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2006. Her first collection will be published by Picador.

Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, Co. Cork, Ireland. His most recent book of poems is The Holy Land, which was published by Faber this spring. His previous books have been nominated for both the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread awards. In 2004 he was selected as one of the UK’s ‘Next’ Generation Poets. He has co-edited with scientist Jon Turney A Quark for Mister Mark (Faber, 2000); and, with John Burnside, the ecological anthology Wild Reckoning, a tribute to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. He teaches at Goldsmiths College and at Imperial College.

Siobhan Campbell’s poems have appeared in Verse Magazine, The Independent, Poetry Ireland, The Sunday Tribune and elsewhere. Her collections, from Blackstaff Press, are The Permanent Wave and The Cold That Burns. She was a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University.

John Haynes is this year's winner of the Costa Poetry Prize (formerly known as the Whitbread Prize) for his collection, Letter to Patience, Seren. Haynes spent 1970 to 1988 as a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University. Now in the UK, he has continued teaching, writing and publishing and is the author of a number of books: on teaching, style and language theory, as well as African poetry and two other volumes of verse. He has a PhD in applied linguistics.

Bernard O'Donoghue Born Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. Came to England in 1962, and has lived since1965 in Oxford where he teaches Medieval English at Wadham College. 5 books of poetry: Poaching Rights (Gallery Press 1987), and 4 with Chatto - The Weakness 1991; Gunpowder 1995, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize; Here Nor There 1999; Outliving 2003. His Selected Poems are out from Faber in 2008. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.

Oxfam Books & Music Shop

7pm ,Tuesday 29 May

91 Marylebone High Street, W1

near Baker Street tube station.

Admission is free – however a donation of £10 would be most appreciated.

All proceeds will go to Oxfam.

Seating is limited to 75.

To RSVP and reserve a place, please contact Martin Penny by Friday, May 25

telephone: 020 7487 3570

Dawkins Is Wrong

Richard Dawkins, pictured, is wrong.

Stripping away the tedious arguments, his position is that a) God does not exist (as any of the major religions imagine such a being) and that b) belief in God is damaging to society, particularly as it leads to conflict and to fundamentalism that is anti-rationalist. Dawkins is one of the leading atheists of our age. And one of the richest.

My position is antithetical to his.

Taking a), first. It is impossible to prove, using scientific method, the hypothesis "God does not exist" - just as it is impossible to prove the opposite (logically unverifiable) statement. The best a scientist can do is accept an agnostic position - that there is no way of knowing whether or not a God exists. Agnosticism is a sound position. Atheism is an irrational one.

Now, b). If there was no belief in God (i.e. no religion) there would still be conflict and resistance to reason and science. Conflict, between humans, as individuals, tribes and nations (wars, ultimately) is driven by power relations and the need to control a limited supply of desired resources and objects, including other people. As most natural resources are finite, and becoming more so, conflict is likely to continue, with or without any religious sanction. Indeed, from a purely rationalist standpoint, conflict is sometimes the only logical away to defeat one's enemy, subjugate their people, and possess their resources (sadly). Furthermore, regardless of contrary claims, leaders simply use religion (and other causes and belief structures) to drive their own agendas. Other terms like "Freedom" or "Nation" or "Reason" can and have been used in place of religion, to justify the conquest and liquidation of millions of persons. Indeed, the worst atrocities of the 20th century were mediated by ideological and racist positions that had, at base, no religious cause.

There will always be an impulse within humanity to withstand a totalizing definition from Science for all we do and are - irrational, artistic, or spiritual as it may be. The fact is, those "scientists" who refuse to factor in the Religious impulse are only studying half of the human experience, and are therefore unable to make convincing statements about existence, or reality.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2007/story/0,,2089947,00.html

Who

I had dinner with the talented Mr. Chapman, pictured, on Friday, in London. Chapman is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and creator of screen and audio plays. Among other things, he recently wrote the script for Big Finish's 60-minute podcast / CD, Fear of the Daleks, read by Wendy Padbury - for the Companion Chronicles series. It's great, rousing stuff.

Chapman's latest book, which launched recently at the main Waterstone's in Dublin, is a collection of short stories, titled The Wow Signal. It's out from the UK small press Bluechrome, which is doing some good publishing work lately. They'll be putting out another book from Chapman in 2008. In the meantime, he's set for a busy year - in September 2007, he'll be launching his new collection of poems from Salmon. It's been thirteen years since his last full poetry collection, so this will be a strong grouping of his best work over more than the decade.

I've anthologized "The Wow Signal" story in Future Welcome (DC Books, 2005 - it also had poetry from Picador's Annie Freud, among others) - and often published Chapman, in Nthposition, and elsewhere. I think he's one of the most unusual, fresh and startling Irish writers of his generation. Good luck to him.

Cannot Hear The Faulkner

This very brief review originally ran on the 16th of January, 2006, at Eyewear. I am reprinting it now, with the news that the great Coen brothers have made a film version, which went home from Cannes empty-handed, surprising some critics, and will be on general release later this year. It may well be one of the major American films of 2007.

---

Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men is a fascinating blend of Faulkner and Jim Thompson, as if Faulkner had written noir for Hollywood - hold on a minute, he did...

The postponed apocalypse at the end keeps evil at bay but circling, and good down but not out, and is at once dramatically unsatisfying and theologically correct. With nary a proper love scene in site, the terrifying professionalism of gun technology and terminology is displayed in all its well-oiled efficiency, as the author shows us a world by, and for, men on a mission to take life with extreme dispassion (Anton Chigurh, Lecter-like sociopath versus the Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, who could almost be anyman).

The over-arching narrative becomes clear (like the serious flip-side to the opening montage sequence in Forrest Gump, where all his relatives are seen dying in great military battles): history is a series of conflicts, between violent men, some who are more good than others, though none are less than imperfect.

The thin edge of things, it becomes clear, rides on the fact some of us are slightly more humane and thoughtful than others, and that vital, fragile membrane of decency may carry us through - then again, it may be torn to tatters in a hail of sub-machine gun fire. A great and horrible book, whose ugly prose is also its elan vital - the flow is the force is the form - and no one closes it without having come through slaughter.

http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=cannes2007&jump=review&reviewid=VE1117933677&cs=1&p=0

Poem by Janet Vickers

Eyewear is very glad to welcome the British-Canadian poet Janet Vickers (pictured) this Friday.

Vickers was born in Greenford, Middlesex, in 1949. She left England for Canada with her parents and siblings in 1965, settling first near Montreal, then Toronto, and finally Abbotsford, British Columbia. She became a Lay Chaplain, performing rites of passage for Don Heights Unitarian Congregation near Toronto, then after moving to the west coast worked in community support for mental health with Mission Community Services in BC.

She found herself writing poetry in the early 80s and published a chapbook You Were There in 2006. The title poem won the poetry category of the 3rd Annual Vancouver International Writers Festival short story and poetry contest. Her poems have appeared in sub-Terrain, Grain, Quills, anthologies such as Down in the Valley (Ekstasis), Corporate Watch's This Poem is Sponsored by ... - and online at Nthposition.

She has recently completed her studies in Adult Education at the University College of the Fraser Valley and is now working with an editorial committee for the Canadian Unitarian Council anthology Shoreline - Water Poems, to be published this May. Vickers has been a supportive and engaged correspondent for several years, and a long-time reader of this blog. I've long appreciated her poems, and her convictions, and think it only right and meet that she appear as a Friday feature.

Naming the Dead

Now you could sell your bodies

to Hollywood like the famous and rich

get paid to write a screen play

be interviewed on a late night show

sell a memoir, endorse perfume

or training shoes

provide authoritative world views

for parliament or academia.

Today four hundred wait outside

for hours so that millions can see

the vivisection of your last hours

and they will name you victims while others

call you martyrs to the ones still walking.

The whole world asking what, when and how.

Marnie and Andrea, Georgina and Mona,

Brenda and Sereena: who will be there

to say your life is worth more

than your parts? Who will ask why?

poem by Janet Vickers