Life Lines 2 Launched and Available To Order

Life Lines 2 has been launched, and is now available for £4.99 across the UK, in all 127 Oxfam book shops. I edited it, and was able to collect donated poems from 55 British, Irish and American poets. The poems were donated by the poets and their publishers, and recorded live, mainly in Soho and Camden. Poetry works. To order it online go here.

Taken At The Flood

There is a tide in the affairs of men, and so on. Gordon Brown, the British PM with the sombre brow and deep solemn voice, this week-end made a terrible mistake. As the whole country seemed to be running pell-mell down a hill to a general election - this riderless cycle set in swing by the kick of no other than Brown himself - he suddenly showed a loss of nerve, and called the whole thing off. Inevitability has never looked so second-rate. Brown has cancelled the check he wrote, the one that, if cashed, would have given him a major win, I believe. Instead, looking into the whites (or greens) of that pseudo-Blair, Tory Cameron (un-teleprompted that he is), Mr. Brown blinked. He caved in. He threw in the towel. He is the Northern Rock of UK politics, now, on which Labour will build increasingly shifting fortunes. Time will run out, Mr. Brown. You lost your moment. Like Hamilton, in pole position, your tire blew before you got to lift the golden prize.

Back from Cheltenham!

The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival (5-14 October) may be the best of its kind in the known universe. Established in 1949, this year its attractive image features a hand, with, on each finger, a word - not just a word, but a word doing something. This bold hand urges us to: "Question, Debate, Discover, Engage, Enjoy". Literature could also do with the following Prison Breakesque body-commands on its other hand: Learn, Change, Create, Critique, Share.

This year will feature an astonishing range of writers and bookish figures from across the tiny planet we call home (as we say), including, yes, myself. More on that in a minute. Others appearing include: Alan Alda, Al Alvarez, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Iain Banks, Pat Barker, Simon Callow, Douglas Coupland, Alain de Botton, Sebastian Faulks, AA Gill, Stephen Hawking, Nick Hornby, Mimi Khalvati, Galway Kinnell, Naomi Klein, Ken Loach, Ian McEwan, Daljit Nagra, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Pinker, Craig Raine, General Sir Michael Rose, Helen Thomas, Lynne Truss, Michael Wood, Xinran and Johnny Zucker.

It is an honour to appear. And appear I did, for the official launch of Life Lines 2: Poets for Oxfam, which I edited. It was at the Town Hall, 5 October 2007, from 7.30-8.30 pm, with talk and poetry readings from myself, Michael Rosen and Kate Clanchy. I am now back in London.

Poem by Sheila Hillier

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Sheila Hillier (pictured, in a photo by Derek Adams) this Friday, especially as this is her birthday.

Hillier is a medical sociologist who has researched in China for many years and is now Professor Emeritus at Queen Mary's School of Medicine. She began writing poetry in 2001 under the direction of the late Julia Casterton. I have been working with her on her poems, through the Poetry School, these last few years.

Her work is widely published in British poetry magazines, including at Nthposition, and she was recently commended in the UK's highly-prestigious National Poetry competition, for the poem included below. Hillier is currently putting together her first full collection. I think it is a very impressive manuscript.


Pollux and Castor, elephants

Krupps’ cannons pound the walls,
the darkness smells of soil and gas;
at Voison’s, rue Cambon, a special black card
buys sauce souris on pate of rat.

It’s a challenge to garnish donkey with cepes;
there’s a gold market for cats of all colours
Castor feels itching deep in his trunk,
Pollux walks in the snow and shivers.

The gates of the Jardin des Plantes have been chained
for over a week, but now carts from de Boos
are waiting outside. Zebras are easy, Martin the bear
puts up a fight, now they draw on a ruse

and Adolphe Lebeeque, whom Castor knows well
wheels out the last kilos of branches and fruit
which he tips at the base of their sandpaper tree
as others take aim from the rainwater butt.

Grey lumps too big to be dragged,
so they’re jointed there in a scratch abbatoir.
Feet sliced away first, and eager talk spreads
to long lines outside the Boucherie Courtier.

A starving gourmet hurries out to catch
the carrier pigeon’s fragile message,
which unfurled, says, Yes! There’s ‘variety meat’
in a siege menu of elephant blood sausage.

Goncourt dines at seven, the evening sky
is brilliant with the enemy’s flares.
There’s Consomm’ Oliphant, filet de mulet
and rarest, by Choron, the trompe sauce Chasseur,

nearly spoiled by Adolphe, who wept bitterly,
gripping dead Castor’s trunk in the snow.
The butchers were waiting to finish their work:
‘C’est foutu Adolphe!’ But he wouldn’t let go.

poem by Sheila Hillier

BBC Oxford

Kate Clanchy and I were on BBC Radio (Oxford) today for about 30 minutes, with host Jo Thoenes, discussing poetry, and the new Oxfam CD, Life Lines 2. The show should be available for replay online at some point. She asked me for a limerick, while on air, on her name. Here is my hastily composed effort...

There once was a girl name of Jo

Whose speed was fast, not slow

She interviewed Todd Swift

On her show for a lift

And now Jo is raring to go.

---

I should have worked radio and head into this one, as Radiohead - digital pioneers that they are - hail from Oxford. Oh well.

Happy National Poetry Day

National Poetry Day. I understand why some poet-theorists, like Charles Bernstein, resist the lure of such public celebrations of an otherwise private, and ideologically-complex art. Poems, arguably, are meant to oppose just such occasions, such broad-beam jamborees. To question everything civic and communal. To resist, with language, any too-easy consumption of language. Language should also stick in the throat, not just slide down like so much predigested pap. Okay, but as poetry is already on the outside of civil society for 360-plus days of the year, a day, a week, even a month, in which to bring its riches before the public is not necessarily a bad thing. Only so, if the only poetry celebrated is simply rubbish. Which most poetry isn't. Even the most so-called mainstream, or traditional, work, has its moments of challenge. No good poem can be just simple, just accessible, even if it seems so. A swan dive requires skill to execute, as do all elegant acts, and so should not be avoided in favour of cannonballs simply to readjust water levels and raise eyebrows. The arc in the air is the thing, as well as the splash made. But, let us not pretend, either, that all poetry is good for children, or for the air, or for the mind. Art can destroy as well as build, upset the apple cart as well as pick an apple from a ladder. National Poetry Days need to contain the elements of strange surprise and danger that are also inherent in poems, in order to tell more of the story about poems.

Here is a poem of mine, an homage to Larkin, about the state of literacy and culture in Britain, to share with you this day.

Library Going

“Libraries in the UK will be redundant by 2020” – BBC news

I return, even though the due date’s faded.
The glue’s decayed, lets gape an erotic
Separation between card and page. 2020
Is not so much a time as a place, loaded
With laser-visions of dystopic outrages:
One being the library’s gutted, dead as

A church. Pigeons for squatters, mice;
Screens unplugged from their machines
Have taken their flat coma minds away,
Now as functionless as a drinks tray
At an AA meeting; as sad as memorabilia
For a team that never had a victory.

The books themselves assume the position:
They spread out on their desert island
Shelves, the castaway long gone:
To rescue or sun-picked oblivion. Bloated
By rain-damage, yellowed, quiet as kids
Traumatized by the playground into books

And music, they spell out culture’s purpose:
U-S-E-L-E-S-S. Queuing where they would
Have stamped my tomes, then run them
Over that queer magnetic beam device
(Sometimes forgotten so all hell’s bells
Went off, startling the pensioners, the mad

Homeless and the religious elf, whose home
This was, because theirs was lonely, unheated)
I joke about late charges, and toy with an idea
Of asking the invisible librarian out for tea.
Her reply is vacant and worthless, anyway;
As are all these authors, glossy covers,

And flattering blurbs: best, better, and so on.
What did those reviews get them in the end?
A better type of casket? A leggier friend?
Anonymous? Take your pick. Even famous
Writers get lost in indifference, once dust:
Their agents have moved to digital recreation.

Still, it isn’t so bad in this page-littered
Mausoleum, a permanent autumn of loose
Leaves and broken spines: it’s just a ward
Where all the injured veterans of some old
Romantic war lie, under their sheets, to fold
Into the future like a memory of wind-turning

Narration: a novel ride, reading, at the sea,
Or, like a faithful canine, that bedside block
That kept you an insomniac; that door-stop
Whose catacombs contained words, characters,
And even a sense of falling into love, or destiny.
No one borrows now. They read, if they do,

Off monocles, implants, it’s all direct. No
Going to a building to get a bunch of stories
To carry home, like groceries: all delivered
Over optic wire, at the speed of vision.
I leave the copy I neglected for so long
On the returns trolley, then stop in the middle

To snicker, take a bow, cough loudly,
Then finally sneeze. Once, this was verboten.
Not anymore. No one to care to shush,
Or put a prudish finger to their thin lips.
Acting out, I yell: f-ck literacy! An owl
Or an addict mumbles back; my own voice

Echoes off the subjects, from Art to Zoology.
Time to go. On the way out, on forever-loan
One supposes, I acquire a How To guide
To automotive repair, and a battered thriller.
I know how both end, but still desire the act
Of taking my literate communion publicly.

poem by Todd Swift

2007 Forward Prize Winners

Congratulations to Sean O'Brien, and Daljit Nagra, who both won Forward prizes today, on National Poetry Day in Britain. Alice Oswald also won the prize, for best poem. Hats off to her as well.

O'Brien is the first to win the Best Book prize three times, since 1995, and Nagra, the UK's most-talked-about new poet for years, now establishes his collection as something of a contemporary popular poetry classic. Nagra is one of 56 poets on the new Oxfam poetry CD launched at The Cheltenham Literary Festival tomorrow. O'Brien was one of the first poets to read for the Oxfam Poetry Series, in London, in 2004, as pictured above, with fellow poet Polly Clark, who also read that night.

Both poets are now likely to compete for the T.S. Eliot Prize, awarded in January 2008, along with 8 others who will be shortlisted. It should be a strong field.