Saturday, November 19, 2016

Simon Perrril at The Arts Centre, Edge Hill

Simon Perril read at the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, on the 16th: a wonderful evening of poetry and visuals. He's carrying one of them below!
 
Simon Perril was born in 1968 and lives in Oakham, Rutland. His poetry collections include Nitrate (Salt) and A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher Press). He has written widely on contemporary poetry and poetics, and edited The Salt Companion to John James (Salt). He teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, and loves silent movies and noisy music. And cats.
 
"My poetry roots go back to discovering the New American Poetry of the 50s and 60s and the "British Poetry Revival" of the 60s and 70s pretty much simultaneously, thanks to local book dealers in Cambridge, and the alternative academy that was Compendium bookshop in Camden, London. Reading the work of Iain Sinclair and Tom Raworth was particularly influential early on, and it didn't take long to find other contemporary 'linguistically innovative' poets as a student at Cambridge College of Art and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).”
 
 Recent books are the related Archilochus on the Moon (Bristol: Shearsman, 2014) and Between (Bristol: Shearsman, 2016)), both of which Simon read from. Before the evening he aired a new poetics piece for my MA group.
 
 
The first half featured winners of the Rhiannon Evans Poetry Award: Joanne Ashcroft, Laura Tickle, Sarah Billington, Steve Fletcher and Jessica Tillings, all of whom read well. Four of them are featured on Pages. See here for posts to 25 Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill:





 
 

Monday, November 14, 2016

Robert Sheppard at 60 An Educated Desire published a year ago


A year ago today (see here, here and  here) I was surprised at my 60th birthday party to be honoured with An Educated Desire: For Robert Sheppard at Sixty. (No getting away from it with a title like that.) The party was good. Above you can see me being given the book, and the one copy oddly found its way among the condiments, and also some evidence of the party's aftermath. Oh, and Rita. (The photos of revellers are not public documents, but Rita is a public figure!)

The book is still available from Knives Forks and Spoons here. It contains some wonderful textual and visual (and colour) work! Thanks again everybody, particularly Scott Thurston and Patricia Farrell.

The mathematically challenged will have trouble working out how old I am this year. Soon it will be somebody else's turn...


Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Clark Allison; Second online review of The Meaning of Form

Perennial and Multifarious Forms
Clark Allison’s piece on Stride is the second notice of my book and is labelled carefully ‘a brief response to Sheppard’s Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave)’, but it’s not brief at all. It does have a particular focus, as he explains: ‘I am predominantly interested at this stage … in Sheppard’s critical methodology,’ and that’s what he gives us. Thanks Clark, and thanks Rupert for publishing. Do have a read:


There is another review by Ian Brinton (see here) and a general introduction to the volume (with links to various associated pages) here. I show the ‘working out’ of some of the chapters and parts of chapters (along with digressions, caprices, poetic effusions and – frankly – jokes) in posts on this blog, and they are arranged, for scholar and lay-person alike, at what I call a ‘hub-post’, i.e., largely a page of links to all the posts pertaining to the chapters of the book in its earliest form: HERE.

The Meaning of Form may be purchased here: UK buyers http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319340449

Clark’s review of my History or Sleep may be read here, and his piece on the state of British Poetry from 2008 may be read here. His poem 'Mind's Eye' may be read here from the earliest days of Pages here.